cesarharada.com/blog

About Me

Cesar Harada (28) is an French-Japanese inventor and entrepreneur.
Cesar invented a ground-breaking sailing technology, a boat that changes shape, “Protei”. Originally developed to clean up the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Protei is an Open Hardware project now developed by an international community of scientists, engineers and designers for many other applications such as nuclear radiation sensing off Japan, plastic sensing in the Pacific garbage patch, red tide studies in Mexico and much more.
Cesar is also the general coordinator of the future International Ocean Station. Former Project leader at MIT, Cesar teaches Masters in Design & Environment at Goldsmiths University in London. Cesar graduated in 2009 from the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Arts in London, his collaborative project Open_Sailing received the Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for the [NEXT IDEA].

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How I feel right now

Sometimes, the colors of an image can describe best how I feel.

Filed under  //  Mapping   NOLA   Photography   Road Movie   Road Trip  
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Air pollution

Air pollution?

Just took that picture today on the way to work... Driving from New Orleans (Louisiana) to Mobile (Alabama). LA Bucket Brigade just celebrated yesterday its 10 years of existence, a non-profit organization, fighting for air quality against big corporations...

Filed under  //  LA Bucket Brigade   LABB   Mobile   NOLA   New Orleans   Phone   Photography   Pollution   air  
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Woods Hole - Providence - New Haven - New York - New Orleans

It's been a while :) So, here, some recent pictures of the places I have seen. 


Maybe, I should find myself labelled similarly : 
"IF FOUND ADRIFT CONTACT MOORING OPERATIONS GROUP WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION WOODS HOLE MA 02543 USA 508 548 1401"

And some cool graphic design now :) A WIFI map, at Woods Hole Institute

And some animals you want to be friend with

Where the oil goes

Providence, RI. Cute

Yale University in New Haven
Yes, this is inside the university. My friend told me they call this the "Cathedral of Knowledge". This place was built recently, and in place of the apostles and prophets, you can see the great minds of our times - mostly scientists. It is hard to make a clearer statement of how science is our new religion. This has a lot of good and bad. What is beyond science that will define the next chapter of human History?

Italian rainbow, New Haven

More driving - between New Haven and New York 

On our (Harrison Leaf and I) way to the Open Hardware Summit, in Queens NY
This panel comes from a little community shop in New Orleans ; sometimes at the summit in NY I was thinking "Hardware is Open in general, just brake it open, see what's inside, understand and copy the idea, do your version, don''t even think about the intellectual property, just do it - this is how most people think in the developing world - most people - "real" people" ...

More cool graphic design from New Orleans

A toe shark attack reported in .... Dauphin Island, Alabama !

But "the best on earth" is in New Orleans

Flying above New Orleans at night

Saint Claude Bridge

Love shells

Le grand faste, New Orleans Antique Shop

Filed under  //  New Haven   New Orleans   New York   Photography   Pictures   Traveling   Woods Hole  
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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 !

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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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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