Staying on the Straight and Narrow
This sequence was generated from individual shots taken every two seconds on my Nexus 4, while driving a farm land detour route from the main E18 through Vestfold, Norway, last Tuesday. Speed limit 70 km/h (approx 43 mph). Kinda nice scenery – but I prefer the main highway and it’s 110 km/h (70 mph). The gif is rather large at 8Mb.
How did you set the timer?
Jeremiah Burns – I have to admit that these are manual exposures 🙂 I used to have a camera app that could do time lapse, but it wasn’t Android 5.0 compatible.
That looks a lot like the videos from the cameras on our road survey measurement vehicles. Ours are distance triggered, though. We take a panorama picture every metre.
Thomas Mueller:
Interesting.. I did something similar for bike lane surveys in the Netherlands. We used an industrial pc running windows and two USB webcams (one forward looking, one backward). A Delphi app tagged these images with GPS data from and external antenna a portable display showed the route to drive on a map, along with routes had been logged already. I used dspack to grab the two cam feeds. We stored 2 images every 10 meters.
Nowadays it probably makes more sense to use mobile phones for something like that. They have better camera’s, they’re cheaper and much smaller… Just crappier to develop and debug 🙂
Also, 4G is available in every corner of the country, so now I would consider having pictures be sent to a server over the air, while we had to collect hard drives in the past, which is expensive due to high labour costs, and it also caused delays because we had to wait for the data to arrive…
Wouter van Nifterick we do exactly what you describe, but sending the pictures via internet would not be possible due to the large size of the data. Also, mobile Internet in Germany is still far from ubiquitous, reliable, fast and cheap. Our regular vehicles have got 7 cameras, 3 of which take a photo of every single metre of road. The system can easily be extended with more cameras as we need them. They have additional sensors for other measurements, many of them laser based. We also have now two vehicles for bicycle lanes.
The software is written in Delphi. It was originally based on DSPack too, but we changed that for performance reasons.
You don’t happen to look for a job? We currently have an opening for a Delphi developer. German language is a requirement though.