“Flickr Bikes” Photo-Map Locales Across the Globe

For their new “Purple Pedals” campaign, Yahoo has dispatched a handful of GPS-enabled bicycles equipped with cameraphones that automatically shoot and upload photos to Flickr to riders in cities all over the world, from San Francisco to New York and soon, to Singapore, Denmark and the U.K.. The bikes come with solar panels which power the camera, and special software that uses the phone’s accelerometer to snap photos every 60 seconds automatically when the bike is in motion. I was one of the lucky folks to get my hands on one of these bikes, and I’ve been riding it all over San Diego for over a week now. Let’s take a look at how the bike works, how it was made, and how you can turn your handlebars into a tripod and photo-map your neighborhood in similar fashion.

The Anatomy of the Flickr Bike

The Flickr bikes have two main components: a waterproof, rotating cameraphone housing mounted to the handlebars, and the solar panels and a control panel for charging the bike behind the seat.

Here’s what the cameraphone housing looks like up close. You can rotate the housing backwards 180 degrees to take a photo of yourself (upside down) while you’re riding, and simply turn your wheel to pan left or right. Inside there’s a Nokia N95 cameraphone with a custom Python script which fires off the shutter every 60 seconds while the phone’s accelerometer detects that you’re in motion, and uploads the resulting photo with geotags to the bike’s Flickr account.

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