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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!
...how long will it be before he gets sued by Barbra Streisand?
Bash script for FP whores
Good thing it's so cheap -- he'll have to study the photos very carefully if he wants to recover it when the helium finally leaks out!
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.
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.
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.
Speaking of gadgets to use in projects like this one...
In the July 24th Boston Globe, Ritz is advertising something called a "Dakota Digital Single-Use Camera."
Now, I've seen a "digital single-use cameras" from Kodak which just used film, and the only thing "digital" about them is that when you send them in for processing, they scan the negatives and send you a CD along with the prints.
But this one SAYS "Delete and Retake Last Shot," which, to me, suggests that it really IS digital. It's $10.99. It says it will take 25 images. No indication of resolution. And no indication of precisely what you do after you have taken the pictures.
I probably need to get one and crack one open. It sounds like a very interesting device for hacking.
It will be very annoying if it turns out that $10.99 means that you pay $60.00 up front and get $49.01 back when you bring it in for "processing," though.
Googling on "Dakota Digital Single-Use Camera" and even "Digital Single-Use Camera" doesn't turn up anything except that phony Kodak film camera...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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).
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
This is an unmanned tethered balloon. Unless I'm missing an obscure bit of aeronautical jargon here, this regulation doesn't apply. And for good reason I'd gather, since a tethered balloon can be reeled in, but a free balloon (like most weather balloons) goes where it wants once you release it.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Ok, so I have two ideas here. One i think someone has already implemented.
I'm first thinking that balloons could be a really easy way to get a wireless network to cover a large area. A stripped down wireless unit, a super light battery ( or solar/wind power source), and a really large balloon. Put a few of these up on long strings, and i could cover cambridge or back bay (Boston) pretty quickly I would think.
Ok, second idea. What about some wireless hookup for the digital camera, so that you could put a camera up there, and not take it down often, but control the camera (zoom?) - or at least take the pictures, and then transfer them to the ground. I would think that this could really rock. Get 4-8 of those party balloons (at what point is this a 'weather balloon' and are there any laws about these?), so you could pick up 2-4 lbs, then, mount the stuff on a little box. Put a few strings on it, and let it fly. Snap snap snap, download the camera, zoom in, etc...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Funny that this story should come up; I was making an exceptionally long commute to a project today (80 miles each way, 40 of which were in heavy traffic) and was thinking about an analysis of traffic patterns - starting with the hypothesis that the density and speed of vehicles in each lane constitutes a form of pressure and the how this is affected by the number of cars entering and exiting at each intersection, and also the addition / subtraction of lanes along the course of the route. I was thinking that this could be accomplished with some custom image recognition software and a medium-resolution video stream from a several cameras a few thousand feet up (I was thinking helicopters, circling aircraft, and even blimps, but all would be much too expensive). I hadn't considered that a balloon might work so well.....
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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.
Wait, so this involves going outside? Forget that.
matguy(.com)
In populated areas fixedwing can't go below 1000' (legally) but rotor can. I routinely fly between 500 and 1000' feet. I'd probably see one of these things in time but if I didn't it wouldn't be fun. Probably wouldn't damage the aircraft (unless I got real unlucky and a blade hit the camera itself) but it would surely scare the bejeezus out of me. Birds are bad enough, lots of little cameras in ballons does not sound fun.
ehintz
For a modest increase in budget, you can get a big increase in the quality of the photos. In the really light, fairly cheap, and better quality digtal camera catagory are the AIPTek Pencam 1.3 and Mustek Mini3 cameras. I bought my AIPTek Pencam for about $70 and it takes pretty good digital photos at 1.3MP.
Both of them are fairly easy to modify as well and there are sites that show in detail how to take them apart and enable other triggering options - such as a 555 or a radio controlled trigger. One example: http://www.rc-cam.com/camman.htm
how about this cheaper alternative.
I'm working on a similar project (well, if you consider trying to raise the money to be "working"). Being a professional photographer, I want professional results, and that means remote preview through the camera via USB (why oh why don't prosumer cameras come with FireWire?) and of course USB craps out after about 5 meters. But I just found out that someone finally did the impossible, a 1000ft USB extension device. It's an active microprocessor controlled relay device, you need one at both ends, runs off 12v so I could use a 12v battery to power it. But now I can't find the damn vendor. Anyone know who makes this device?
If you don't want to spend all the time, you can download some pretty cool aerial maps from Terra Server USA. The pics are B&W and circa 1994 (at least, in Southern California), which makes them less current, but kinda cool to "look back in history".
... these are in color, and might be a year old.
Additionally, MapQuest has added aerial maps as an option (enter address, retreive regular map, then click the "Aerial Photo" tab
we have had 26 or launches, recovered all but the first one. ground distance is anywhere from several miles up to 200 miles. It radios back telemetry through a ham radio link, which gives us a moving map of us and the payload. actual recovery usually is in northern minnesota swamp/forest land, so we have had a couple that have taken a days to recover. the walk is usually never more than a mile, but that can be in some fairly hostile areas.
Set them up and use them for Airborne recon of M$ and RIAA Headquarters, and if the returned pictures show the HQ below, you press a button to release a small canister of urine, or other disgusting liquid of your choice.
Just a sec, there's some guy in a black trenchcoat at the door...
Many states require that you have an overhead shot of large parcels of land ie. farm sales before the deal can be compleated.
Of course, you should check also check out "$240 Worth of Pudding," but now I'm off topic....
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
That's pretty cool, but check out Kite Aerial Panoramic Photography from one of my heros, Philo!
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.
Ok, I'm an EE so I need to offer some advice...
First, I don't see a protection diode on that relay. You need a diode that will be normally reverse-biased on the coil... otherwise, when the relay clicks off, the inductance of the coil will kick back enough voltage to blow out the 555. It's a reliability issue.
Second, the 555 is a nice analog circuit that's rated for 4.5-15 volts, so no need to use a 7805 voltage regulator; you can connect to the battery directly.
Third, a battery idea: Radioshack has some 12 volt batteries that are about N-size (sub AA). They are typically used for lighters, pagers, or remotes.
Lastly, as you mentioned, the ultimate would be to get rid of the relay and connect directly to the camera. The CMOS version of the 555 would be ideal because (1) it's low power, so you might be able to drive if from the camera's step-up power supply and (2) it has a FET output, so it'll drive much closer the the GND&VCC rails than the TTL version (this should help compatibility)
Good luck, and nice photos!
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