Carcam Roadtrip

Back in the spring of 2005 I live webcammed a road trip around the southern United States, a blogged a bit of it too.  I started in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and made my way all the way to Texas.  The return trip took me all the way back to nyc.  I snapped a photo every 10sec and placed it on a website (via my phone) for people to watch in real-time.  I also saved a copy of each of these photos.  So if anybody wants to get artistic, I have 32,000 photos for you to work with!  Someday, I’ll lay the photos down to a music track and make a short film.  At SXSW I came across a flyer for some folks who did something similiar, but with better camera.

Roadtrip Technology

How does one go about streaming their roadtrip to the web?

Supplies

• Webcam
• Laptop (any flavor OS that suits you)
• Cell phone with internet access
  • and cable/bluetooth connectivity to computer
• 12V DC -> 120V AC adapter
• Optional: FM Transmitter (so you can listen to some fly tunes)
• Optional: GPS (so that you don’t miss an exit jamming to fly tunes)

Some photos of said supplies:

Webcam	Laptop, GPS, FM Tuner	DC/AC Adapter
Optional FM Transmitter	Car (with Webcam)	Driver
Treo 650 Phone

Let’s get technical:

Webcam
Originally I purchased a Logitech Quickcam Express for $ 29USD from Walmart. However, the express only had a CMOS video chip and the quality was terrible. I broke down and purchased a Logitech QuickCam 4000 Pro for $ 99USD. You can get it from newegg for $ 64USD, but I was pressed for time. I am very impressed with the QuickCam 4000 Pro and recommend it highly. It’s 1.3 mega pixel supporting something like 1024×1068 for still photos. For my stream, I’m only using 640×480 to keep the files small.

I taped the webcam to my dashboard with masking tape. The Logitech cam came with two different ‘mini’ tripods. I taped the heavier stand to my dashboard, right in front of the steering wheel. I kept the cord in place with these niffty removable hooks from 3m (The Mini Hooks.)

Software
I’m using the trial edition of TinCam WebCam software on Windows XP. It’s a neat little app that allows you to do a number of fun things with a webcam. I have the software snapping a 640×480 jpeg every 10 seconds and saving it locally with a timestamp for the file name. The software is also sending each picture to my web server via FTP. The app will allow you to store a history of photos (up to 99) and dynamically rename them picture01 though picture99. The app also generates a basic HTML page for you to display your pics. Nothing flashy, but it works.

Internet
I have cellular service with Sprint PCS. I like Sprint because they don’t rip you off with overage charges. They charge you in blocks of 100 minutes for $ 5USD, it’s a pretty good deal. They also have unlimted internet access for USD/month. I plan on abusing that this month with my always on feed ;) I have a Treo 650 which is a great little toy that I recommend. The Treo does not have support to act as a ‘modem’ out of the box. You have to use 3rd party software. I’m using PdaNet, again it’s the evaluation version. It’s a little app that you install on your treo that dials up to the internet. I wanted to note that the PdaNet software will not reconnect your internet connection if it is dropped. You have to click a ‘Connect’ button on your Treo, which isn’t too hard to do while you are driving. The goodnews is that the connetion only droped twice on my way down to Atlanta, and since I was pumping mp3s though my laptop, I could hear the windows ‘bong’ when the connection was dropped. (I had to reboot my laptop during the trip, and it was funny to hear the Windows Logon sound though my car speakers.)

You can connect to PdaNet though hardwire or Bluetooth. I used both without any problems in the PdaNet software. I think the internet is slow enough that you don’t notice a lag with Bluetooth. However, I always seem to have USB/Bluetooth problems with my laptop. I’m not sure if it’s Windows, my laptop, or the cheap $ 18 usd USB Bluetooth key I purchased. My laptop frequently doesn’t recognize the key, so I used the treo USB cable.

Power
I had to borrow a DC/AC power adapter from my roomate Patrick. Thank you Patrick. The device works well, but the fan sounds like it’s dirty and it hums like a lawnmower. Luckily, my rental car has two DC outlets. My laptop and Treo are plugged into the DC adapter. My Belkin FM Transmitter plugs straight into the other car lighter.

Tunes
I don’t have an iPod, I’ve been using my Treo 650 as an mp3 player. However, it only has a 1 Gig SD card, so that wouldn’t fit all the tunes I needed for a 1.5 week roadtrip. I loaded up my laptop with 12 GB of music before heading out (3,200 songs.) The music is a completly random collection made up of tunes from my days with Brent to CDs I burned for Kristine’s iPod mini. It is an ecletic collection. I kept my mouse pointer right over the next key and would had the mouse button frequently to move on to a kick-ass song. You don’t know how cool it feels to hear the opening track to Starwars as your driving down the highway around bends and under bridges. I can’t wait to put this trip to a soundtrack and make a movie.

Lessons Learned

• Make your laptop screen resolution low so that everything appears big and is easy to read while you’re driving. I’m putting it at 640×480.
• Need to know the keyboard shortcuts for my Windows mp3 player (Winamp) so that I can easily skip to the next song.

Road Trip Wiki

I also created a wiki to go along with my trip.  It quickly became internet graffitti, which I didn’t mind.  I’ll post a copy of it someday, but being that it’s pretty explicit, I figured I should leave it off of vinnie.net for the time being.

This was my reasoning behind it:

I’m experimenting with a wiki based homepage for a few reasons

• I find it a quick way to make updates to my website, no hassle of uploading files, …
• Wikiwig has an amazing WYSIWYG editor.
• I am all about open source, sharing content, remixing, …. This is my way of expressing that.
• Adds some artistic touch to my website
• 2-way mediums are cool

I’m experimenting with the idea of a Wiki/Blog hybrid. One of Todd’s friends, James, had some really good ideas and set off a million new ones in my head. James made a good point to experiment with this first before developing anything. So below are my thoughts on what I want out of this Wiki/Blog and it’s pros and cons. I encourange people to contribute ideas and solutions.

Pros

• Dynamic (non-linear) Information – Information in a Wiki is a lot more dynamic. Blogs are too linear and information is lost into the ‘archives.’ A wiki based structure would help keep a lot of fresh ideas current. For instance, let’s say I write an article about podcasting in February (how it works, why to do it, …) Then in April I write another podcasting article about good sites I’ve found. I think it would be best to combine these two postings into one page on ‘podcasting.’ This way if any new people stumble across my site, they will have much more useful information.
  

Cons

• RSS feeds – The wiki software I’m currently using doesn’t support RSS feeds.  That is a huge feature for me as it allows other people to read my new information in an aggregator.  I have to think of ways to incorporate this.  For instance, maybe my ‘journal’ type postings can have the date as the title.  Any new pages created in my wiki would be added to my RSS feed.  And if I created an informative page, such as a page on ‘podcasting,’ then any new information I update on the page will be sent with RSS.  I think this would work very well.  However, RSS is very limited in that in order for a person to edit my content, they will have to click though to my site.  I wish RSS had better commenting features.
• Displaying New Posts – On my homepage, how can I display new blog posts cleanly?  I need to think of ways of organizing all of this information.