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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...
But that's an ODOMETER. Try again, okay?
Wouldn't it have been easier to hook the camera to his odometer, instead of the speedometer?
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
It Works great on this site :-)
And we thought people talking on a cell phone were hazardous.... Doesn't Kodak make an extended roll for professionals, too? I'd think a 200 frame magazine would have been a lot handier, although a pain to change out compared to a standard roll.
Even if you spent an evening just looking at skimming through these, you could get an idea.
It used to be that people often lived their whole lives within walking distance of their home village. You can easily have the equivalent of that today, with close knit communities of other types.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
They were beautiful, weren't they?
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
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.
It's on the Kodak website. Somehow I don't think they would have found it nearly so cool with a digital camera instead of real film.
Visit me on #weirdness on the Galaxynet.
I had some time on my hands once, so I drove from San Jose to Portland to New York to San Diego and then back home. Oh yeah - and a quick visit to Tijuana, for horse tacos or whatever they put in them. Total miles 7K+ in 10 days (I stayed at each stop for a day or two - other than that it was solid driving).
I'll tell you folks, there ain't that much to see from behind the wheel of a car. It's mostly grass.
Anyone who thinks the US is overpopulated has probably never left their home city.
Or around 100, depending on your math skills.
The barn is supposedly where the Last IBM Mainframe ever used at Rose was housed, according to urban legend circa 1982.
--Mike--
There's something fishy with the pictures. Many of them are just *too* picturesque to be believable. Look at pictures 613 and 614, for example; they're both ends of the same service station! The same jeep is even in both pictures! Is this service station really a mile long?
Have you ever driven across the US? I did it four times when I was in the military. The time I drove the speed limited 24ft U-Haul across was not very fun but the other three were. I truely enjoyed the experience. You DO NOT need an SUV or minivan to have a good time, even with a family of four. Most of my fun was because I enjoyed driving my car, a 91 Mustang GT. Nothing great but was relatively new at the time and very well suited for a long highway battle, very stable, no struggling up the hills, not taken by the wind and only 2k rpm's at 80mph.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
The best part is the fact that he stopped every 36 miles to swap film rolls.
So that's who's still buying film.
"And like that
Notice on the "slide show" they have Arizona labled "COLORADO".
You'd think a site about photographing the various states of the USA, that they could get the state names right.
I could then put in some coordinates from the GPS, and viola, a cool project.
--Mike--
A couple years ago my now-wife and I took a road trip in a 19-foot van named MURR! (that was really its name). We took two months, just about, and drove down from Vancouver, BC down to San Diego, across to Texas and New Orleans, up through Kentucky (Hi Amelie!), Ohio and Milwaukee (Hi Melissa!), then to Ontario, across the northern States again, up through Saskatchewan, Alberta and BC...home again, jiggity-jog. All told, 20,700 km (speak metric, American dogs!).
My idea was to get a Super-8 camera and a timer. I calculated that one frame every minute would, over two months, add up to about an hour of footage, which seemed the perfect length for a documentary-ish sort of thing -- narration, music, whatnot.
It was during the leadup to takeoff that I discovered that a camera that could do this wouldn't come cheap -- I think the one place I checked said >$1k, which scared the pants off me. The van and everything else cost a lot more than I'd expected, and as it was we ended up coming back with something like $50 in our pocket (which to my mind means our timing was perfect).
What I would do now is get a laptop and a webcam. I work at a small ISP, and one of our customers is a construction company that has a webcam and a FreeBSD box set up to take time-lapse photography of their latest construction site. The pix and movies are really neat, and that would have been a much easier and cheaper solution.
Crap...just realized that the worst part of me sitting here and reminiscing like this is that the guy's site is sure to be slashdotted now...oh well, I'll wait 'til Sunday when his server's cooled down a bit.
Carousel is a lie!
Way nifty
Don't you mean the odometer? You know, the device that tells you how many miles your car has traveled.
"As soon as the thirty-sixth came, I would change rolls, put the exposed roll in a canister, enter its number on a log sheet, take the next one out of the cooler, and insert it. I got to where I could do all that in less than a minute, while steering with my kneecap."
At least he wasn't driving some dangerous vehicle while performing these stunts, like a Ford Explorer!
On his first try, he drove a Porsche and "didn't do enough research," he says. On his next trip, in a high-slung Ford Explorer, he traveled on old highways, mostly U.S. 30, 40 and 50.
Doh?
"And like that
... he'd hooked it up to include the GPS coordinates and orientation of each picture!
Especially considering his photos end up being displayed as about 100x200 pixels, a digital camera would have made this a *ton* easier. Not to mention, if he hadn't gotten sponsored by Kodak, the film (& development) of this would have cost about $3000.
He used his odometer.
He used a camera with FILM.
He didn't have to stop to change the film.
At night he would mark the last mile, find a motel, sleep.
Then he would resume the trip at the last mile.
Ahhhg. Please mod this +5 redundant and email to all your friends for the ultimate in redundacy.
Digital is not always better. Digital cameras and digitial video certinaly offer alot in cost savings and convenience, but there are certain effects that are still far superior using analog inputs. Consider black & white movies -- films like It's A Wonderful Life have a fabulous luminescance to them that can't be reproduced today...even analog stock manufacturing techniques have changed so much. And NO, it's not practical to assume that you can just build a filter in photoshop/premiere...
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Why not? Kodak invented the Digital Camera, you would think they would have been just as happy. Maybe even happier since it would promote their digital cameras.
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
except he strapped an ATX mobo, DC/DC converter, and a tonne of led acid batteries to his body.
He then ducttaped a webcam to his shoulder and grabbed images every few seconds, saving them to a laptop disk. The next mission was to have that dialed up to a cellphone to post images to the net every few mins - but i dont know how far he got with that.
Damned slashdot broke the url...d
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/onTheRoa
/ postcards/tellYourFriends.shtml?mile=1
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
wouldn't it be his odometer?
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This person's project is actually a very crude version of a special camera system used by many state transportation authorities to map freeways.
I believe that California's CalTrans has special movies that show the view out front on a freeway that has pictures taken every 50 feet or so. I remember seeing a news report on KCRA (Sacramento's main TV station) about these pretty amazing movies.
this is the kind of project where technology in the form of a digital camera would have been nice :) This is a cool project though. No matter how good digitals get, nothing bets a good 35mm
Do they say when this trip happened?
When i drove from CT, CA in 3 days, i took rolls of picture while driving of, landmarks, and pictures of speedlimit signs, with my speedometer in the frame. one shot in colorado was a 75mph zone, and i was going 126mph, and there was a vw passat overtaking me.
Michael Naimark, a famous interactive artist, put something similar together many years ago here in California. His project was based on Caltrans footage that was taken at 100 frames per mile along El Camino Real in Silicon Valley. Looks like it was done in 1975 and 1987. Check it out at http://www.naimark.net/projects/elcamino.html
Wasn't Matt the same guy that's been on those Subway commercials 'cause he lost a ton of weight eating subs? Man this guy gets around...
</humor>
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
The odometer is also tied into this.. in fact, most odometers of the past several years have used stepper motors to turn the digits. In the past 2 years most manufacturers have dispensed with that completely and gone to a digital display.
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Speedometer measures speed. Odometer measures distance. I don't even have to read the article to see that detail.
Let's see, there were some VR guys that mounted a camera on a bike and took side-looking photos every few feet through some Colorado town, and put together a VR tour of the place. I'm moving in a month or so and wanted to do the same for where I've lived for the past decade.
Games magazine once had a puzzle consisting of a dozen photos along a very similar route; the goal was to put them into the proper order. It wasn't too hard for me, as I've driven from my house (St. Louis, MO) to my then-mother-in-law's house (Columbus, OH) more times that I can count. Going the other direction, some friends from college and I drove to Colorado for spring skiing for way too many years. So, yeah, I know I-70 pretty well.
A year ago, I drove my oldest son to Boston to attend college and took pictures with a PalmPix almost every step of the way, mostly of things that had always intriged me but that I hadn't seen for years. In particular, there used to be an old barn just east of the Indiana-Ohio state line that was painted with one of the old Apollo pictures of Earth rising over the lunar horizon. It was gone (or repainted) on my last trip through, so don't bother looking for it now. If anyone has any recollections, or better yet pictures, post a reply to this.
Well, that's all for now, I guess. I'm going to scroll through those pictures looking for things that I recognize.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
looks like he hacked his odometer, not his speedometer. Odometers click off the miles, speedometers tell you how fast yer goin'.
I read the post and envisioned a flash sequence of speedometer readings - ooh look, he's back up at 85 again... doh must've been pulled over, we're stopped.
- Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
I'm not sure where you're looking but this is what I see:
[613] - Picture of a service station
[614] - Picture of an empty field
-- Find the Truth...
An American flag on Slashdot is supposed to mean "bad news". What is it doing on this story?
I misunderstood. I tought it meant he took a picture of the speedometer every mile. For some reason, I was strangely disappointed to find that this was not the case.
Now I just hope that I don't slashdot the sight.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Wouldn't it have been easier to hook the camera to his odometer, instead of the speedometer?
Hey, maybe you could rig it to take a photo every time your speed drops below 50 mph. You might get some exciting pictures of stoplights, motels, convenience stores, etc.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
No, I think I know what you're saying, but I think the point is that it's possible that this method could be flawed.
Now, assuming that I could see this (I can't)...I see the gas station and then an open field...
It is certainly possible for the guy to have driven into town for the night...driven ~1/2 mile into town and then driven back to the gas station.
It's possible, but what I think is more likely is that there's a bug in the flash code used on the site and the poster was seeing the same exact image twice...
I've seen plenty of places where flash is used well to do things that otherwise couldn't be done. Despite all the anti-flash sentiment around here, it's not flash or macromedia itself which sucks, it's designers which insist on making kludgy, overbranded, full-flash sites which suck. Macromedia is actually trying to educate its users about usability and trying to encourage them in the next flash.
Flash ain't a bad tool, but only in the right places, and this is one of the better uses I've seen...
I think this is a neat art project, but this would have been much easier to do with a digital camera, GPS, and a latop. No stopping to change rolls of film. No worrying about sequencing the rolls. Easier to make into a flash movie. A hell of a lot cheaper to process.
I do like this idea. I may have to try it on my motorcycle for my next long trip.
It seems like he went through some of the most boring, flattest parts of the US on his trip. Even through Colorado and Utah, everything was flat. What's up with that?
:-)
Probably too hard to change the film every 36 miles while driving around the edge of a canyon.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Some years ago, some dude here in Iceland did hookup a movie camera to a car's odometer and took one frame every kilometer. Then he drove road no. 1, the road that more or less circles the country, and made a 1 hr. movie out of it. I have only seen parts of it, and it is really weird, AFAIR, you more or less follow the speed of sound.
Here is the result, btw.
Went through these, fun to see that they went pretty close to my permanent home (huber heights, ohio -- east of vandalia, ohio on the map) and I think the closest picture to my home is #666! Huber Heights, Ohio the mark of the beast indeed. Well, we did have a kenny rogers roasters restaurant for a while.....yech.
And for once I'm glad to see an application of flash that is interactive, well-designed, doesn't attempt to cause epileptic seizures AND doesn't try to sell me something.
Because every picture would be of whatever car happened to be in front of him at the time, with a different landscape background for each shot.
Anyway, there really isn't supposed to be much continuity between successive shots. You're supposed to look at the whole thing. It would actally be quite amazing to see prints of all of these shots lined up from east to west. If you made them 5x7's, though, they would line up to 1927 feet, 4 inches or about 0.36 mile. And that's with no space between each print. I guess you could get it to a quarter mile by using 4x6 prints. However, there aren't many gallerys with a quarter mile wall.
My other first post is car post.
so it would still have been interesting for them to sponsor the trip, even if it didn't use film.
Say no to software patents.
You know, I was thinking about that, too. But in the earlier comments discussing speedometer vs odometer. I found myself thinking that if I had a camera pointing sideways out one of my windows while I was driving, every picture would be blurry. However, if you chose a 90 degree angle and rotated the camera between 0 degrees (pointing straight out the side) and 90 degrees (pointing straight out the windshield) by 1 degree per mile per hour, I would think you would drastically reduce the number of blurry pictures.
The added benefit of course would be to have 30 chances to get the mountains that are ahead of you, instead of wasting those shots on wheat or whatever it is. Of course, if you set your cruise at 80mph, most of your pictures will have the frame of your car slicing right down the middle. Roofcam!
Intelligent Life on Earth
Picture 412 is of downtown Pittsburgh, PA... which also happens to be one of their telephone area codes!
Intelligent Life on Earth
You're a little bit off there. A 100 foot roll of bulk load film is good for about 18 rolls, 36 exposures each. 36*18 = 648 exposures, not 800.
Also, the equipment you linked to doesn't appear to work with any autofocus Nikon bodies, something that I think would be pretty vital in this situation.
On that note, I would use a Canon body. The optics are nearly as good as Nikon, and the autofocus system is much faster, and in my experience, more reliably hits the objects you really wanted.
Actually, much of the "mountain" states is on high plateaus and is relatively flat. Especially if you stay on interstates, which largely follow old railroad lines which were deliberately routed on flat terrain.
However you still hit "hiccups" of mountain ranges. I-90 through Montana is especially noteworthy in this regard. If only the RV drivers understood that they might climb hills faster than semis and other RVs, but a sports car over the horizon can maintain 80 MPH even when climbing and *will* soon be on their ass if thet get in the left-most lane.
If I had run a camera like that, I would have only shown pictures of high plains and the back end of RVs.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken