In our weekly How-To this week we showed you how we hacked an old digital camera to take a photo automatically as fast as it can until the memory card fills up or the battery dies using a $1.49 LM555 Timer Chip from RadioShack. As mentioned in our intro, once you do this to a digital camera there are lots of other things you can do, and here's one in progress, the BlackBoxing of our car by tagging photos with GPS coordinates.
Black box?We use this term loosely, since theres not really a term that better describes it. The experimental project were
working on tracks where a car has been (via GPS) as well as taking many photos for each mile Based on our first round
of testing we get about 800 photos per hour, or 10 photos per mile (city). Each photo is time stamped and the GPS unit
records time as well as location, so its fairly easy to match up the data and images to look back at the route, speed,
locations and more. Theres a Sony camera
attachment that combines GPS and still photos now, so we might use one of those at some point.
Perhaps in the future when digital camera and storage are so cheap and so pervasive, well have cameras recording all
of our driving and occasionally use the data, logs, images and video for insurance or other purpose
as described
here. This of course opens a whole other discussion about privacy, but for now, we are doing all this to ourself so
shame us, whatever.
The Camera
The camera we used is from our earlier How-To. Its
an old Olympus Digital camera that uses SmartMedia cards, its been sitting in our basement for 2 years waiting to go
for car rides and fly on kites. We hacked it to automatically take photos until the card is full or the batteries
die.
The Mount + GPS
To mount, actually hang, the camera in the car we used a coat hanger and some electrical tape (this is a prototype for now). We placed the Garmin GPS Forerunner on the hanger as well.
The Drive
We drove around 3 miles in about 12 minutes taking over 125 photos from our starting point to RadioShack (our final
destination in the University of Washington District).
The Map
Heres the route we took from a starting point in Freemont, WA and ending at the RadioShack in the U-District.
If you want to see how we made the maps we have that
How-to as well, basically we imported the data from the GPS and ran it through an application that grabs the photos
from a free satellite photo server.
The Photos
The camera took over 120 photos on our trip logging the time, while the GPS logged the time and location. It would
take way too long to post all 120 photos (and most are the backs of cars) so, here are some from our trip with
location. If youre hardcore and want to check out all 120 photos and the XML file drop us a line.
Whats next
Were still finishing up the kite photography How-To which will be up shortly, if youre in the Seattle area and its nice out, drop us a line if you want to check out our experiment this weekend.
...as well as adding a small digital camera to our organic dog, stay tuned.
Phillip Torrone can be reached via his personal site: http://www.flashenabled.com