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Camera Meets Speedometer, Travel Across Country Together

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the digital-would-have-been-easier dept.

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...

18 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. I can hear them now... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

  2. getting out more often by Alien54 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Perople who do not get out enough rarely have any notion as to just how $%#$&^@ huge the country is.

    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"
  3. Damn... by dimator · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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))"
    1. Re:Damn... by Mr.Intel · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm glad they didn't edit those out like so many movies have. It's a shame to attempt to erase from media what should be an icon of human endeavor.

      --
      ASCII tastes bad dude.
      Binary it is then.
  4. Reminds me of Confluence.org by Viking+Coder · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  5. Re:speedometer? by Masem · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.

    --
    "Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
    "I can see my house from here!" - ST:
  6. Fishy by Brian+Kendig · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Fishy by Mr.Intel · · Score: 3, Informative

      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?

      OK, first there is no jeep. Second, 612 is grass/sky, 613 is a service stations and 614 is grass/sky

      --
      ASCII tastes bad dude.
      Binary it is then.
  7. I always wondered... by tswinzig · · Score: 3, Funny

    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 ... he's gone."
    1. Re:I always wondered... by _ph1ux_ · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  8. Clear a few things up. by jonnythan · · Score: 4, Informative
    If you READ THE SITE,the guy actually changed rolls every 36 miles, but he didn't necessarily stop.
    Shooting through an open window meant no air-conditioning, so he kept the Kodak 5028 VPH film in a cooler. "I would count the miles," he says. "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."
    Also, it was actually attached to his odometer, not speedometer, and he could delay each picture for a moment with a switch if he liked.
    Every time a mile ended, a device attached to the odometer made an electric contact that triggered the shutter release. If a cement wall or other nearby object blocked the view, he had a switch that would delay a picture for a moment.
    And, he did it all twice. First time in a porsche along the interstate, which didn't go so well. Second time in an Explorer along old highways.

    Way nifty :D
  9. hook it up to your GPS instead by mmusn · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  10. Do it digital... by kzinti · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  11. Re:Stopped? by psavo · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well.. it's not Kodak that makes the, but maker of camera.
    For example Nikon has 250 & 750 frame (check them out -- huge) 'backs'. You need to take back from your camera and change it.

    Of course you need lots of film for that too. Pretty much standard is 100ft (30.5m) or 55ft (17m) rolls (with these you can fill standard 36 exposure canisters). That is enough for about 800 exposures.

    --
    fucktard is a tenderhearted description
  12. odometer, not speedometer by byrd77 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  13. Re:Clearly not geography majors... by daeley · · Score: 4, Funny

    What's the big deal? Everything between California and New York is pretty much the same thing. ;-D

    --
    I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
  14. Where's the speedometer? by harlows_monkeys · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  15. Re:I didn't know the US was that flat by mgv · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.