Mark Crosbie’s Lego Street View Car that we blogged in June is back, completely rebuilt:
I wanted to re-build the car to only use the Lego Mindstorms NXT motors. I was also keen to make it look more….car-like. The result, after 4 months of experimentation, is version 2.0 of the Lego Street View Car.
Every time an image is captured the current latitude and longitude are recorded from the dGPS. The NXT creates a KML format file in the flash filesystem which is then uploaded from the NXT to a PC. Opening the KML file in Google Earth shows the path that the car drove, and also has placemarks for every picture you took along the way.
The images are captured by triggering the camera on my iPhone. I use an app called SoundSnap which triggers the camera when a loud sound is heard by the phone. By placing the iPhone over the NXT speaker I can trigger the iPhone camera by playing a loud tone on the NXT. While this is not ideal (Bluetooth would be better) it does the job for now.
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