After two days of rest and preparations, today I set out on 33 days of leave. Heading north, following the coast, avoiding ferries on this busy first few days, bypassing terrain within easy reach of home, with no firm objective except live within my energy means and be back in time for work on the first Wednesday in July. Bike mileage as I leave home is 6213km.
Solar trailer rides again!
- Thread starter matthewslack
- Start date
Have you attached your front and rear video cameras yet? 33 days is a looooong cycling trip... that chap I bought the small CF from said that one must cycle faster than midges (can fly, not cycle).
Yes and no, a few shots coming later, when I work out where they are !
There are issues of energy use and also ginormous quantities of video, too large ever to do anything with, so one of my holiday tasks is to play around a bit. Already paying dividends as you'll see later.
I went in for the full monty, GoPro 10 black, as secondhand keep there value so well, could not get a 7 8 or 9 at sensible price. Three batteries, usb charger that the solar battery usb port will charge, plus the special door that allows external power cable for unlimited run time. And in for a penny etc, the remote, mounted on right bar for thumb operation of the 'highlight' button to mark those close passes.
I have mounts on the handlebars, on both front trailer corners which can be used facing either way, and also rear facing on the end of the rack mounted battery.
My first recording is the fastest time lapse setting, 2 frames per second, facing backwards on the offside trailer corner, on the 8 miles of awful busy A82 from Corran Ferry to Fort William. Six notable close passes, pictures of the 2 inch gap to follow...
Close pass of the day award goes to DY71PJJ. Images are taken at 0.5 second intervals.
How did he miss me?
How did he miss me?
Stats for the day: 113km, 679Wh generated, half the Shimano battery consumed and 783Wh from the solar battery, so total of about a round 1kWh. Big northerly headwind, balanced by goodly amounts of sun, and a useful 120Wh charge at my first camp.
Big relief that the changes made since Wales and back are all fine.
Lunch.
Rather fine stained glass in the Spean Bridge Haggis garden.
Evening sun.
Big relief that the changes made since Wales and back are all fine.
Lunch.
Rather fine stained glass in the Spean Bridge Haggis garden.
Evening sun.
It was probably driven by a badger, most cars are, like this BMW today. There's no telling what a badger might suddenly do
Report that to plod, with video evidence he will get done.
Does it have to be video evidence, not photos? If so, he's going to need a big hard drive to store such massive video recorded incidents recorded over 33 days.
I'm trying to imagine what would have happened if that car had hit his trailer on that corner or side - jacknife resulting in @matthewslack 's bike being turned, so that he's facing the passing car, or ending up in the path of the car? Or sudden stop jacknifed with a broken axle? If hit by a car on that corner at speed, might the trailer have been turned over and the bike toppled?
Matt is posting on here on the move and pics as well, probably can download or share the film by whatsapp or soem other platform to save.
A lot of police forces have a website to post shockingly poor driving films which they can act on.
A lot of police forces have a website to post shockingly poor driving films which they can act on.
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I really wish that action cameras had a setting where one could speficy a video file size limit. Each of my video files are 3.5GB in size, and if there's something within I'd like to show as evidence, and if only unedited video footage is admissable as evidence, I would have to keep the entire 3.5GB file. Of course I could upload a short snippet, after editing it in an editing program on a laptop or computer and produce an output file, or by uploading the entire 3.5gb file to Youtube and editing within Youtube... but being able to define a sensible file size like say sequential 100mb sections instead of 3.5GB, would be a handy feature. One would have to write a program to do that to the video stream using a connected external computer.
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This sort of thing may have of course happened many times before, but not seen or recorded - it's horrifying enough reliving shocking events with my one front facing camera, which gives me pause when considering installing a rear camera...Absolutely shocking.
Ongoing, and impressive response so far. It wasn't a 999 because it wasn't a hit, and 101 is almost always too busy, so went to Police Scotland website, followed through to the only other way of contact, which looked like a comment form, made clear in title and comment nature of incident, and this morning had a text message with an incident number etc.
Lunchtime got through on 101, invited to face to face interview when I get back, and phone interview in meantime. I let the call handler know that there are likely to be a few per day to report, which they give me the impression they do want to hear about.
So thumbs up for my local force.
I was thinking of you today, as I had the camera facing forward, so captured several overtakes into the face of oncoming traffic, like yours a while back.It was probably driven by a badger, most cars are, like this BMW today. There's no telling what a badger might suddenly do
No excuse for any of them as clear road with many overtaking opps, and me getting out of the way at every layby.
When I find the footage, today's stars are mostly motorbikes, with a few SUVs and an Asda deliver van.
Brilliant day 2, wall to wall sunshine, battery full all day, 81 miles, pics later. Just transferring media from internal storage to big micro SD card, so nothing accessible until done. Fingers crossed it is doing what it says!
Early days for me with cameras, but the timelapse seems good for evidence, and as a bonus shows me going 15 times as fast as real time!
I can mark highlights using the GoPro remote to mark incidents, and the GoPro app has a step through frame by frame, and I can either save frames as photos, or screen grab.
The charger takes two batteries and happily runs off the solar battery USB, and if I start the day all full, like today, I have run camera all day with three battery swaps. Haven't tried the USB cable power method yet.
Yet to settle on a video upload location. Youtube? WordPress blog?
When I get home, another blue pipe buffer is going on, either just the offside corner, or same as the front. Then I would be nudged sideways instead of receiving all the kinetic energy of the vehicle behind.
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