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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
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.
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 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:[.]
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.....
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
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.
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
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.
That's pretty cool, but check out Kite Aerial Panoramic Photography from one of my heros, Philo!