

$300 Home-Brew Street-View Camera - cesare
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/the-300-home-brew-street-view-camera/

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stcredzero
$300 is about the right price point for a workable car-surveilance system. I'd
like to have something to make a record of:

    
    
        - People who hit your parked car with their doors
        - Police walking up to your window to talk with you
          (No voice recording, of course.)
        - Interactions with other cars & traffic signals
    

The 3rd one bears some explaining: I would like a record of what is happening
because people in an accident often flat-out _lie_. I hate that. Also, I want
my own evidence pertaining to traffic lights. If traffic lights can have
cameras, I want my own photographic record of the lights!

~~~
lupin_sansei
Maybe in the future the Police could give you a commission for selling them
footage of traffic violations. _evil laugh_

~~~
dejb
I'm not sure if you'd have to pay some people to report things like like
'going slow in the passing lane', 'tailgating' or other annoying and dangerous
driving. Heck I'd like to be able to perform a citizens arrest on people for
not indicating.

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harpastum
From the IEEE source [1] it says that he bought $25 web cams for the project
(apparently MSRP$75). I doubt the side-facing cameras get any type of picture
quality at all at 30mph, let alone 62. (Update: motion is _extremely_ blurry
at high resolution [2]).

Also, from the IEEE article "I wrote a Python script to capture the eight
1280-by-1024 JPEG files. That capture takes about 8 seconds." That results in
8 non-synchronus pictures, taken at 8 second intervals.

At 30mph (44 feet per second), eight seconds is a 352 foot gap—a standard
block in Manhattan is about 264 by 900 feet [3], which leaves you _one capture
every 1.3 blocks_ on the short streets.

Interesting way to make a 360 degree camera. Completely unreasonable for a 360
degree camera _in motion_.

.

[1][http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/diy-
streetview-c...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/diy-streetview-
camera/0)

[2][http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=232323867291121678&#...</a><p>[3]<a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_block"
rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_block</a>

~~~
mseebach
Mount the whole thing on the top of a broomstick with a switch on the bottom.
Walk, set the stick down (activating the switch), hold it still, waiting 8
seconds (maybe the PC could make a sound when the capture is complete), and
walk on. You could map out a reasonably sized neighborhood in an afternoon.

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ZeroGravitas
The OpenStreetMap project does stuff like this:

They've just started stitching together aerial shots from small planes into
flat "satellite" images that they can trace map features from. (Yahoo also
lets them trace some of theirs, and the bought some for coverage in Palestine
but this lets them fill in the gaps):

[http://www.cloudsourced.com/2009/09/22/openstreetmap-
takes-t...](http://www.cloudsourced.com/2009/09/22/openstreetmap-takes-to-the-
skies-above-stratford/)

Flickr just announced that you can associate photos with streets, buildings
etc in openstreetmap via machine tags:

[http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/09/28/thats-maybe-a-bit-
too...](http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/09/28/thats-maybe-a-bit-too-dorky-
even-for-us/)

There is an OpenStreetView but they've only just started, not much more than a
domain:

<http://openstreetview.org/>

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zackattack
Eyes in the back of your head!

