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$50 Aerial Digital Photography from a Balloon
jizmonkey writes "This guy built
a balloon to
take digital aerial photographs from thousands of feet up. It cost
less than $50 altogether, including the image sensor, controller, and
balloon. The circuit is surprisingly straightforward: just a hacked Vivitar
minicamera, a 555 timer
chip driving a relay through a voltage regulator, and a one-meter
party balloon like the ones you see at used car dealerships. It just so
happens that the entire circuit, strapped to a piece of a pizza box and
tied to a really long string, is light enough to be lifted by the balloon.
What could low-cost aerial photography be used for? I'm sure some people have
some ideas...."
...how long will it be before he gets sued by Barbra Streisand?
Bash script for FP whores
Naked Sunbathing
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
this criticism from a guy named "larry bagina?"
/.
Too funny. Only on
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I just had a vision of releasing prisoners early, and using this balloon/camera thingy to track their every move. It hovers over them all the time, and feeds pictures back to some central point so their whereabouts can be monitored at all times. They're free to go wherever the rest of us can go, but they have this camera hovering over them all the time until their sentence is up. Think of the savings in jail accomodation!
Then the fatal flaw hit me: the ex-con goes for a job interview, holding a 1m balloon with a camera suspended below it, on a piece of string, in an office trying to describe how he'd be a great employee.
The local bad guys' public bar would look like a fairground, full of shiny balloons. "Mum, can we go play in that new inside park?" would be the cry from the kindergarten set.
Or imagine a typical NBA game. With the number of balloons that would be floating over the players, nobody would be able to watch the game. Hold on - there's no reason the balloons couldn't contain advertising.
Well, actually that's several fatal flaws, but I still think it has "weird and cool" merits that override the "it's a really, really dumb idea" issues. This idea has a really great application somewhere, but I just can't see it at the moment.
Gotta get more sleep tonight
Wait, so this involves going outside? Forget that.
matguy(.com)