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big red thing?

I think, isolated from its context this image is very strange and funny :

Filed under // Alabama Balloon Blur Funny Grassrootsmapping Joke Mapping Photo

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Grassroots mapping camera mount ***

to fly tethered to this kite / balloon !

As promised, here is a step by step instructable to build a great Grassroots mapping camera mount *** for a helium balloon or a kite. This particular model is made from one big bottle of soda, all plastic, provides better protection against hard landing, moderate rain, better image stabilization with longer wings for drag, less plastic lost in the fabrication, easier and safer adjust with the screw tap :)

A quick reminder for the newcomers : a group of DIY warriors, called Grassrootsmapping.org put together techniques of aerial photography to study the effect of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico seen from 500ft above. The aerial survey are often conducted by the folks of LA Bucket Brigade, the independent NGO that created the crowd-sourced oil spill map (report!) and since 10 years defends Louisiana victims of air pollution, BIG UP LABB! So, the idea is to fly helium balloons or kites 500ft high with camera mounted on them, taking pictures every 5 or 10 seconds. We stitch the pictures to make high definition maps (below) for scientific study or against BP at the court of Justice. Yes, not only beautiful, very useful.

To make this big cool map on your computer (see detailled post about image stitching) you will need a helium balloon or a kite capable of lifting your camera in its mount. To fabricate the mount you will need the following tools :

Start by drilling the bottom of the bottle with a large drill bit, here ø 1 cm. Carefully.

Cut the bottle above the casting line :

Insert the bottom of the bottle you just cut in the bottle itself until the head :

Cut a large stripe of the bottle, leaving enough on the bottle head side to host a camera :

Cut the large stripe :

Cut the large stripe in the length :

Now you have 2 narrow stripes :

Fold them in 2 in the length :

Both of them :

Cut the end of each of the narrow stripes in a "pig feet" :

If you have a welder, you can make the "pig feet" more durable by "welding" the end of the cut

Put "feet to feet" the folded stripes :

Duct tape one side of the "feet nails" :

Mark where you want to insert the feets :

With a blade - ideally with the soldering iron, make a cut the width of the stripe :

Insert the "wings" :)

tape the wings in :

Almost there, nice! Taking shape!

Pass the long thin rope through the nozzle :

Make 2 loops (4 threads) with the thread :

Adjust the tension of the 2 loops :

A simple knot with the 4 threads in :

FIx the threads with string tape to camera (real strong, if you use bad tape your camera may fall from 500ft in the water / in the sand / on the rocks :_(

Pull the rope back in the body :

Pull stronger till the camera doesn't move much anymore:

Screw the cap in, with the threads forced (and probably twisted while you screw in):

The screw cap with hold the 4 threads securely, it easier to adjust, and also be easy to remove :

Test the balance of your devicem ideally with a fan, your camera mount should swing gently in the wind and follow the wind like a weather vane :)

To avoid having of the mount with the pictures you take, you can crop the extra plastic :

If you want to avoid turbulence and aggravate wind drag you can make fringes at the end of each wings :

you are ready to fly !

Get out of here, inflate a balloon:

or a kite :

Attach your camera mount to the kite, and walk on the beach / or sail !

For the image stitching post : http://cesarharada.posterous.com/bay-jimmy-post-oil-spill-observation

Happy mapping !

Filed under // Aerial Balloon Bottle Camera Design Grassrootsmapping Kite LA Bucket Brigade LABB Louisiana NOLA New Orleans Observation Open-source Open_Sailing Photography Protei Soda technology

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Bay Jimmy, post-oil spill observation

Second post but first large map using the techniques of Grassrootsmapping.org for LA Bucket Brigade – thanks guys for putting this wonderful DIY technology together. So! In the late morning 22nd of July 2010, Hunter Daniel and myself went to map out of Port Sulphur, on these funky boats :

With 2 boats we took this route (see google map) :

I traced this route with my mobile phone Google Nexus One and the fantabulous Open GPS tracker for Android – 4 stars rating!
This is what we could see from the boat, kinda boring :

Soon after I launched a balloon and Hunter a kite out there, kinda exciting :

we captured nice pictures, here 6 details :

These 6 pictures were made using 270 stills… that was a 12 hours work on photoshop sincehugin (an open-source photo mosaic software) didnt do the trick – yet :/ Still working on it to automate the process and spend more time sipping mango juice
In addition to what we had a bad GPS trace – my bad, I mean, it is good but I did’nt know where we started taking pictures on that route… Also the GPS time-stamp and the camera time-stamp did not match… So, here is the trick I found:

1. stitch approximately consecutive images with multiple layers on photoshop, when your shape takes shape you may guess where you are on the map. If you only have pictures of water, you can make a great water map … USELESS! BOOO! When your balloon/kite is up there, make sure it is flying over what you want to see, for us, the coast line – land and water. Wind is crucial, and because of the sun you want to avoid taking pictures when the sun is too high (reflection of the sky in the water).

2. produce a very high resolution map of the area. I didn’t want to do it all manually and I wanted to figure out a hack that would work on every platform (OSX, Windows, Linux), so here we go :
- find your point of interest on any map system, write down the coordinates of the top left hand corner of the tile you want to produce.
- go to http://pallit.lhi.is/bigice/bigpic.html , from here enter your Lat and Long (me : 29.468400, -89.911300), the zoom, number of tiles etc… hit “submit”. It will produce a huge map with a static URL. In my case the URL that produced the map (everything is in the URL PHP request) you see here :
http://pallit.lhi.is/bigice/supergooger.php?lat=29.468400&lon=-89.911300&zoom=18&x_tiles=40&y_tiles=40

– now you have this huge picture, you need to capture it from your browser, download theScreenGrab! add-on for firefox only – but working on all platforms (download Firefox NOW if you don’t have it, you…!). Now, grab that huge picture with the tiny ScreenGrab! button at the bottom right corner of your browser, save as png or jpg.

3. Now, it is much easier to map with a support map! just keep adding layers on photoshop of all the pictures you took, adjusting, stretching, so it matches roughly google maps – you will often find that land shape changes, trees, rivers, buildings etc… that’s very exciting, this is why we are mapping : everything changes !

Ok, so now we have this huge empty map :

That’s another 6 hours work adjusting 700 pics layer by layer on photoshop ; hey, 270 images in 12 hours VS 700 images in 6 hours => see, it is much faster with a support map! We got that :

Don’t forget to put a scale and cardinal orientation + legal mentions.
So, under your eyes that’s a 17000 x 17000 pixel map, made of 970 pictures taken at 1000ft altitude, depicting about 5 linear km of damaged coastline. Combining the 6 details views and the general map we could observe that the south side was much more exposed to the spill (more dark brown brrrrr). Using this map we could also establish that on the exposed side, even the inland waterways are strongly affected by the spill : we can use these maps to quantify the surface affected by the oil spill, and the mass of crude attached to the surface coastline. Now even cooler, you can see these maps on google earth, download the KMZ file here (dont worry it is a tiny file – all the content is online). FLY !

Apart from mapping this catastrophe – which is very useful for scientific study and for lawsuits against BP- why am I personally learning aerial photography? Well, because I am currently designing an oil collecting robot called “protei“.

Protei is a sailing semi-autonomous robot with a long oil absorbing tail. Surface oil drifts downwind, so Protei sails upwind, taking and taking, intercepting oil sheens. Imagine many many of these cheap machines out there in the ocean collecting oil

After some research …

I built a steampunk test machine that is pretty promising with a flexible hull front-steering :

We are also testing at sea the behavior of a long tail, and same, going pretty well …

See these little balloons on the surface of the water? And this is when aerial photography comes handy : to evaluate the efficiency and behavior of Protei, seeing everything from above helps a lot, I can see the trajectory, the movement of the tail, the interaction with oil. Also having a highly visible “flying flag” in the sky is amazing to optimize safety and long range communication (flying antenna)… Exciting no? And the challenge is here, millions of liters of crude oil gushing in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Niger Delta, in Latin America, the middle east, in Asia… Protei_Oil_Spill has a busy future!

Of course, just like grassroots mapping, Protei is developed open-source and collaboratively, so I hope that sometimes soon, Protei will come back to land with a lot of amazing pictures for LA Bucket Brigade and its amazing oil spill map, GrassrootMapping,Cartagen and Open_Sailing! I received most electronic parts for the next prototype of Protei_Oil_Spill this morning (YAY!), I am building in New Orleans, so if you are around, or if you want to help the project remotely, do get in touch – cesar@protei.org – thanks!

Filed under // Balloon Barataria Bay Boat DIY Grassrootsmapping Hacking Jimmy LA Bucket Brigade LABB Louisiana Mapping NOLA New Orleans Observation Oil Oil Spill Open_Sailing Protei Robot Science Sky TEDxOilSpill

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Grassroots mapping

A couple of days ago, we went with the folks of LA Bucket Brigade (again!) to do some grassroots mapping (aerial photography actually) in the Bay Jimmy & Wilkinson Bayou (29.45193, -89.89812), and it was superb ~ and dystopic :/

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Seen from up there is so different from what you see from the water :

We went in those super cool (noisy though) boats :

Boat seen from the balloon (!!!) :

This is how it works :

So we do the same but with a helium Balloon flying at ~1000ft, with a camera attached to it, looking down, taking a picture automatically every 5 seconds or so :

I took a chance to try to enhance the "photography cabin" with Sue Stoessel, Bennie Gregory and Hunter Daniel (in a previous mapping trip though):

You see, it is just a bottle of soda and some duct tape, you can DIY it!

Now you may wonder why we take these pictures :

- for science study and evaluation of the impact of the oil spill on the coast and the marsh lands.

- for legal purposes, so we have evidences of the impact of the oil spill at the court of justice ;)

I'm in love with this technique Gonzo Earth and Grassrootsmapping keep on improving, also because I really need it to assess the efficiency of the oil spill collecting robot I am working on : protei.org. Here we were testing to see how well we can sail the robot upwind with a long tail :

that's the robot I am prototyping this week :

If you want to help on the making of the protei robot, or do some aerial photography of the oil spill, get involved at LA Bucket Brigade, contact Shannon Dosemagen <shannon@labucketbrigade.org>, or Hunter Daniel <hunterdaniel@gmail.com> 901-550-7667 directly by phone to arrange a trip in the sun :)

Filed under // Aerial Balloon Barataria Bay Grassrootsmapping Helium Jimmy LA Bucket Brigade LABB Louisiana Mapping NOLA New Orleans Oil Spill Photography Stitching TEDxBoston TEDxOilSpill Tilling

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