$300 Home-Brew Street-View Camera | Hacker News Reader

$300 Home-Brew Street-View Camera

wired.com

15 pointscesare8 comments

$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!

I would like a wearable device that could record all of my interactions with police for $300. The device would ideally have shock-protection to withstand tasering and multiple nightstick beatings. You know...just in case ;) We could sell hundreds of thousands of those in the US alone ;) We could even upsell people on insurance: a "Personal Pig Protection Policy." It's a startup! Who's with me?

Seriously, though: I was once pulled over by an unmarked police car in a rural area. The cop turned his brights on and then got into my back seat on the passenger side...without saying anything at all. It scared the bejeesus out of me. He completly freaked out in my car - waving his hands and screaming - because he thought that I had almost hit him. (He was parked 'mostly' on the shoulder of the road. Out in the boondocks. With his lights completely off. At 3am. To catch speeders. I was going to work. On the highway. And I got within 50 foot of his car before I saw his cruiser's ass hanging out into the lane. Silly me.) Naturally, the video of this incident in his cruiser had been wiped "that same night." I would have loved to have video of the incident when I was disputing the ticket.

And I also wish that was my worst police experience.

Maybe in the future the Police could give you a commission for selling them footage of traffic violations. evil laugh

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.

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...

[2]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=232323867291121678&#...

[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_block

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.

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...

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...

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

http://openstreetview.org/

Eyes in the back of your head!

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