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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...."
As a private pilot, I hope he keeps this thing below 1,000 feet.
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
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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This was a 1 meter balloon, so isn't affected by these rules.
These rules, as specified in the link, apply only to a balloon with a diameter of more than 6 feet or a gas capacity of more than 115 cubic feet.
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!