This post is about another project. We have too many now, but this one is pretty cool, peripherally related to some other stuff we are already doing, and maybe could even bring some new visitors to our KamVu website. When we lived in Albany, cars sometimes drove by our house faster than we felt was safe with so many kids in the neighborhood and certainly faster than was legal. It never got to the point where we did anything about it, but it seems like there must be a lot of people in a lot of places that have the need to measure the speed of cars passing through their neighborhood.
At the time, I thought it might be fun to put a camera or two in the yard to look at the cars as the go by. It would be a little tough to set them up, but not impossible. The problem is that distinguishing between kids, cats, dogs and all that sort of thing might have been a little tough. I think we still have a wireless camera amongst all our electronics. I do not know why it took me so long, but it dawned on me that if I just put the camera up a lot higher so it was looking down at the street the vision part of the problem would not really be too difficult. It would be possible to capture images of cars passing down the street and calculate their velocity. The whole thing could be done with a remote webcam. My first search on the web turned one up for $43.99.
The thing that is good about it is that we could do it fairly quickly, it would be fairly useful, and it would cost very little.