Nothing Here, but Something Cool Elsewhere

Nothing much has happened lately at our house, robotics-wise. The kids were finishing up their last week of school and getting ready for an end-of-school party at the house. I've been trying to get the yard in shape for the summer. So I've spent the last week just dreaming of robots. The other day I saw a sidebar in Consumer Reports about single-use (disposable) digital cameras. The summary was what I always thought. What an expensive way to get digital pictures! But in my robotics frame-of-mind, it finally dawned on me: these things would be really cool to hack. Imagine, a relatively low resolution camera for $10-$20. So I looked around on the internet and found that indeed, there is a community of single-use digital camera hackers that have been doing this for at least two years. My favorite is here. I also ran across a group of amateur radio operators (hams) who used such a camera to take pictures from a weather baloon at over 32,000 feet. How cool is that?