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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...

9 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. 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"
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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?

  5. 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
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.