Slashdot Mirror
Camera Meets Speedometer, Travel Across Country Together
BluKnight writes "This guy hacked his camera to his speedometer, and ended up taking a picture EVERY MILE during a trip across the US. Kodak has the results (Flash in use!) of this venture. For my next hack, I'm going to interface to my digital camera to take a picture every time I blink -- I'll never miss what I'm seeing again!" The best part is the fact that he stopped every 36 miles to swap film rolls. Sad thing is, I understand this. (I still love film) The interactive map is -really- well done, but requires flash...
Check out Confluence, which is another cool project involving digital images and geographic locations. Their goal is to take a photo at every confluence point - an intersection of integer longitude and latitude points. Very fun, very cool.
This is a cool map, showing where they have photos, and is fully navigable.
Education is the silver bullet.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
... he'd hooked it up to include the GPS coordinates and orientation of each picture!
The ultimate open source - every spot in the world on camera, everybody in the world is everyone elses' big brother => lots of little brothers. I don't see why anybody would want to travel abroad now, just take these pictures in London (England), Macchu Pichu (Andes), ancient ruins as of yet unnamed (Bolivia), Pyramids (Egypt). Personally I can spend a few months at this site alone if it was big enough, honestly. Just look at the success of Webshots and that just spews out pictures of rabbits, mountains, dogs, cats all at random. Nothing can beat the Dallas skyline on a beautiful red sunset evening reflecting off the skyscrapers with hazy-red skyline. Nice. I'm sure there are lots of other places with views just as spectacular but nobody has ever been there or heard of it.
For instance, an architect would love to see places with beautiful buildings, the travel agent doesn't give two hoots about what building is where and who made it. This architect can just log on and see the building structure in Spain, France, Canada, Russia, heck even Vietnam and other thrid world countries.
A computer programmer would want to see the last remaining building with a VAX inside to mourn (or last Win 95 machine to celebrate), the travel agent would have no idea what he is talking about, but the computer programmer could call up any worlwide location at will so it's not a problem.
I can't imagine how many people there are in Oklahoma or whatever that can't afford travelling to Canada or France or England or Mexico or Brazil. This way they can get one heck of a taste. Brilliant idea, I'll be watching this closely.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
It's probably more useful to hook up a camera to a GPS system. That way, not only can you snap a picture every mile, you can also record where exactly it was snapped without having to make guesses.
The best part is the fact that he stopped every 36 miles to swap film rolls. Sad thing is, I understand this. (I still love film).
But this sounds like a situation where a digital camera is better suited. The purpose of this is not to create single great photos, where film is still much better suited, but to create a series of photos to be strung together and viewed as an animation or hypermedia/nonlinear form.
Connect the digital camera to a laptop, and let the laptop monitor the odometer. The computer can click off the photos at the appropriate intervals, download them, and rescale them on the fly (for f in *.jpg; do djpeg $f | pnmscale -xy 640 480 | cjpeg -q 85 > s-$f && rm $f; done). Or with sufficient disk space, you might not need to rescale the photos. At any rate, let the computer manage the image acquisition - never stop to change film, never fill up the camera's flash memory, and stop only for gas and Dr Pepper.
As someone who loves to make timelapses with my Kodak DC290, I have actually though of doing something like this - mounting the camera in the car and programming it to take photos every 30 to 60 seconds. Syncing to the odometer is a cool touch!
--Jim
I think you'll find the speedo/odo assembly receives pulses from the gearbox output shaft. So in fact the odometer is being driven more directly than the speedometer (which uses the pulses/time to display the speed).
At least that was the case for truck tachograph units when I worked on them a long long time ago...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Every city should do this every 20 years; it's great when you are trying to learn about the historyof your community.
ya but if he did that - kodak would never had paid for the trip, his portfolio wouldnt be advertised on kodaks website - and he wouldnt have been paid a fee to display all that pics on kodak.com.
/. effect brings em. too bad they will be hoping in vein for the bonus when the sales figures come in and they cant spot a good conversion rate.
he would have just been a kook who had hacked his digital cam to snap a shot at every turn of the odometer.
sorry kodak - but this does not inspire me to go out and buy more film and take more pictures. unless you have a lot of beautiful naked girls that would like me to photograph them....
of course now that this is live on slashdot - all the kodak marketing types are sitting back rubbing their hand in glee when they see the hits
Now I just hope that I don't slashdot the sight.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.