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Weirdish use cases? 1) Allow homeowners to take a timelapse of their backyard. For each frame (or some video interval) determine what areas are in sun vs shade

Weirdish use cases? 1) Allow homeowners to take a timelapse of their backyard. For each frame (or some video interval) determine what areas are in sun vs shade. Then greyscale the image and overlay with a heatmap showing hours of sun in each area. Or have 1/2 hour increment bandings. 2) Road monitoring of various types. Traffic count and speed. Common visitors / time of visit (garbage, street cleaning etc, postal, newspaper delivery).

mvoodarla 5y ago
1) Wow I've never heard that one before but that's so interesting. I'm just thinking of my parents who love gardening and the insight they might get from that. If you want to leverage our platform for a personal project like that, let us know! Might need to add a few new features to make that seamless. 2) This one we currently support + work with. Thanks for bringing it up again :)
- onphonenow 5y ago
  OK - I actually did this once already. My simple version. I just took a picture every minute in grayscale, then stacked them, then banded that by brightness, then laid that color on a shadowed picture so you could kind of see what was what. Key improvements though would be some type of classification of sun vs not sun for a pixel (based on the entire stream of pixels for the day for that spot to make it easier) because dark stuff in the yard / walls etc messed up my approach. And banding the color (most gardening says things like needs 6 hours of sun a day) so you can clearly see outlines of areas by hours of sun. Yes, a lot of people don't know how much sun a spot gets and don't want to sit out all day watching (front yard / back yard etc).
DavidPeiffer 5y ago
1) Would be really helpful when moving into a new house. It takes a bit of time to figure out how big the shadows from trees are, how it varies by season, what time a garden area gets shaded by a fence, etc. I've looked into if there are any sunlight simulators available, but my Google-fu has been lacking. Even if I had a tool that told me "on this date and time, at your location, a 1 meter tall stick casts a shadow _x_ meters in length in _y_ direction", that would be workable.
- frayesto 5y ago
  This is relatively simple to create yourself. There are closed form equations that can be used for the angular position of the sun, which will be more than accurate for this purpose. Then it's mostly some simple trig to determine areas that have a line of sight to the sun. I have this on my to-do list because in my bedroom on a full moon the light will come through one specific window onto our pillows. i wanted to automate either curtains or something to predict when it'll happen. Maybe eventually I'll get around to something like this

mvoodarla 5y ago

1) Wow I've never heard that one before but that's so interesting. I'm just thinking of my parents who love gardening and the insight they might get from that. If you want to leverage our platform for a personal project like that, let us know! Might need to add a few new features to make that seamless. 2) This one we currently support + work with. Thanks for bringing it up again :)

onphonenow 5y ago
OK - I actually did this once already. My simple version. I just took a picture every minute in grayscale, then stacked them, then banded that by brightness, then laid that color on a shadowed picture so you could kind of see what was what. Key improvements though would be some type of classification of sun vs not sun for a pixel (based on the entire stream of pixels for the day for that spot to make it easier) because dark stuff in the yard / walls etc messed up my approach. And banding the color (most gardening says things like needs 6 hours of sun a day) so you can clearly see outlines of areas by hours of sun. Yes, a lot of people don't know how much sun a spot gets and don't want to sit out all day watching (front yard / back yard etc).

DavidPeiffer 5y ago

1) Would be really helpful when moving into a new house. It takes a bit of time to figure out how big the shadows from trees are, how it varies by season, what time a garden area gets shaded by a fence, etc. I've looked into if there are any sunlight simulators available, but my Google-fu has been lacking. Even if I had a tool that told me "on this date and time, at your location, a 1 meter tall stick casts a shadow _x_ meters in length in _y_ direction", that would be workable.

frayesto 5y ago
This is relatively simple to create yourself. There are closed form equations that can be used for the angular position of the sun, which will be more than accurate for this purpose. Then it's mostly some simple trig to determine areas that have a line of sight to the sun. I have this on my to-do list because in my bedroom on a full moon the light will come through one specific window onto our pillows. i wanted to automate either curtains or something to predict when it'll happen. Maybe eventually I'll get around to something like this