Just a week or so ago, Seth took a day-long bike ride up and down the New England coastline as part of the Rhode Island chapter of Team in Training, the world’s largest charity sports training program (money raised goes to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society).  Tellart loves documentation, so we couldn’t resist the opportunity to outfit Seth with a few extra accessories for his 100-mile ride: we attached his iPhone and some extra battery packs to his bike via a modified iTMP handlebar mount, zip-ties, and Gorilla tape.

The extra hardware and phone were to support a special iPhone app we whipped up for the occasion – one that follows the path of the bike using GPS and snaps a photo every 1/8th of a mile. We ported its results over to the 100 mile photoscape project page, where you can check out the mapped ride, the photos plotted along it, and the 100-mile panorama they created.

The application takes photos without user input – a feature that only became available to developers a few weeks before the ride, with iPhone OS 3.1. Based on either time or distance settings, the app automatically takes a series of photos.  Every photo is stored with GPS location information, as well as a time-stamp, and a velocity profile.  In order to ensure that the phone would run through-out the long ride, we rigged up auxiliary batteries through a regulator and added them to Seth’s already weighty saddle bag (already holding 2 spare tubes, 2 CO2 catridges, and tire levers).

The time settings can be adjusted to take between 1 and 120 photos per minute (somewhat restricted by the capabilities of the iPhone’s camera capture), and the distance settings can be adjusted to take one photo per mile all the way down to one every 3 feet.

We hope to have the application in the iTunes app store soon – we will announce it here when it’s ready!