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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...."
Implications? An increased number of one-meter-balloon purchases and camera-raining-down-from-sky events in suburbia... Incidentally, you can get nice high-res aerial images of almost every major populated area in the US for just under the price tag of this rigged weather balloon: Keyhole's Earthviewer software and service, $49.95 a month... By all means, though, if it's an image from above of the new 2:1 scale Star Wars vessel you built in your backyard that you need and Keyhole's archived shots won't do it for you, be my guest and rig one of these babies up!
Maybe he's friends with this guy...
As a private pilot, I hope he keeps this thing below 1,000 feet.
...as Kite Aerial Photography. Same idea, except you suspend the camera from a kite.
Kite Aerial Photography
Mosaics of kite aerial photographs
Aerial photography using a balloon at Burning Man
Other types of aerial photography (balloon, helicopter, kite, even periscope!)
It reads as follows:In english, it basically means that you are out of luck trying to get camera footage of anything if there is so much as a cloud in the sky.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
I spoke to a guy doing aerial photogrophy using a blimp (not motorized ... essentially a balloon). He said his main business was doing promotional photos for land developers and local governements (Gold Coast, Australia).
Photos
or
High Altitude Balloon Project
William Freeman has a good page on his MIT AI lab homepage about doing the same thing except using kites to take pictures. (Btw, check out William T Freemans MIT e-mail address...)
http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/wtf/kite.html
And another link to a good site is Charles Benton's site.
http://www.arch.ced.berkeley.edu/kap/
Its interesting to note that there are lots of methos for creating unstructured panoramas. Where you have a set of images and the algorithm does its best to determine how to stick the images together to form a panorama. You could imagine a similar algorithm using these images to auotmatically create aerial maps... might make a good paper.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
I think Walgreens beat them: Walgreen's single-use digital camera
"it's 'the only single use camera' with a delete button to let them retake shots"
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
how about this cheaper alternative.
Somebody (not the person in this story) was doing a coastal survey of a US coastline (Florida, I think, though I could be wrong) and this involved taking lots and lots of overlapping photographs of it. Streisand has a house on the coastline and she's trying to sue the people taking the photographs for some sum of money, claiming that they're violating her privacy by taking photographs of the coast in and around her house.
Here's a link I found from some quick Google searching.
Bash script for FP whores
If you don't want to spend all the time, you can download some pretty cool aerial maps from Terra Server USA. The pics are B&W and circa 1994 (at least, in Southern California), which makes them less current, but kinda cool to "look back in history".
... these are in color, and might be a year old.
Additionally, MapQuest has added aerial maps as an option (enter address, retreive regular map, then click the "Aerial Photo" tab
You can get details on the Streisand lawsuit there, also...
There's a guy who's been flying around the Oregon and California coastlines taking aerial shots and putting them on his website. It's actually quite nice. He has documented the entire California coast except for the restricted area around an Air Force base.
Goregeous photos.
And one can tell that he's put a lot of hard work into his project.
Here's the problem. Barbara's got her panties in a bunch because this guy's photos show exactly how to get to her secluded beachfront mansion. So she's trying to sue him for invasion of privacy or some such BS.
She seems to not know that any deranged fan who has her address could get directions to her house from Mapquest. Who knows, if she realized this, she'd probably sue them too.
Sorry, I don't have the project's URL handy.
wbs.
Huh?
He could save some weight with just a few little mods. First, get rid of the voltage regulator and just put a current limiting resistor in series with the relay. Second, use the 9v battery as the power supply for the camera. All he would have to do is measure the current the camera uses and put a resistor in series with it to drop the voltage (or maybe two resistors acting as a voltage divider if the camera doesn't use much current). Third, remove the case from the camera and just use a couple pieces of tape to hold everything together. 4, if he's using the 9v to power the whole thing, the timer is going to have a common ground with the camera so he can use another method to trigger the shutter and save the weight of the relay. One option would be to tie the output of the 555 to the shutter through a couple voltage dividing resistors to trigger it directly bypassing the switch, but this would depend on how the trigger circuit in the camera works.
As for the timing, he could add another 555 timer as a delay to start the second one after the balloon is at the desired height. Then it wouldn't matter how long it took to get it in the air and more of the pictures would be usable.