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...

Comments

Reminds me of Confluence.org

[Viking Coder]

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.

Re:speedometer?

[Masem]

I'm sure that they meant odometer (the dial that measures distance the car travels), but there's no reason that you can't build a program that integrates a real-time reading from the speedometer (the dial that indicates your speed) to get at distance, and thus to count off every mile. In fact, assuming that the speedometer signal is electronic in nature (such as 0 speed = 0 mV, 120 mph = 5mV) it's probably easier to grab this value than to mechanically grab the odometer value.

hook it up to your GPS instead

[mmusn]

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.

Do it digital...

[kzinti]

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

Re:I always wondered...

[_ph1ux_]

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.

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 /. 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.