$300 Home-Brew Street-View Camera

$300 is about the right price point for a workable car-surveilance system. I'd like to have something to make a record of:<p><pre><code> - 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 &#38; traffic signals </code></pre> The 3rd one bears some explaining: I would like a record of what is happening because people in an accident often flat-out <i>lie</i>. 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!

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 <i>extremely</i> blurry at high resolution [2]).<p>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.<p>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 <i>one capture every 1.3 blocks</i> on the short streets.<p>Interesting way to make a 360 degree camera. Completely unreasonable for a 360 degree camera <i>in motion</i>.<p>.<p>[1]<a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/diy-streetview-camera/0" rel="nofollow">http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/diy-streetview-c...</a><p>[2]<a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=232323867291121678&#38;ei=x4HFSsy1H46VlAe58qXfBg&#38;q=+NX-6000&#38;hl=en&#38;client=safari#" rel="nofollow">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>

The OpenStreetMap project does stuff like this:<p>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):<p><a href="http://www.cloudsourced.com/2009/09/22/openstreetmap-takes-to-the-skies-above-stratford/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cloudsourced.com/2009/09/22/openstreetmap-takes-t...</a><p>Flickr just announced that you can associate photos with streets, buildings etc in openstreetmap via machine tags:<p><a href="http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/09/28/thats-maybe-a-bit-too-dorky-even-for-us/" rel="nofollow">http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/09/28/thats-maybe-a-bit-too...</a><p>There is an OpenStreetView but they've only just started, not much more than a domain:<p><a href="http://openstreetview.org/" rel="nofollow">http://openstreetview.org/</a>

Eyes in the back of your head!