For over a year, Jeffrey Yoo Warren, a fellow at the Center for Future Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been messing around with kites, balloons and cameras. The goal is to come up with tools that can be used to take aerial photos without the use of expensive equipment.
Now the project, known as Grassroots Mapping, is recording the devastating effects of the gulf oil spill using cameras attached to kites. They say these photos can then be used to assess and respond to the damage and to support possible “litigation following the spill.”
The group’s website provides full access to the maps they have generated, with all imagery in the public domain, as well as a materials list for building your own kite-camera.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
