I definitely thought about this, but my main concern was that a mast would increase the torque due to wind resistance. It would also make the camera visually stand out more, but I prefer the lower profile.

Seeing the roof of my car is a bit ugly in these videos, but I don’t think it’s occluding much useful data, pretty much just the sidewalks nearest to the road.

I haven’t tried turning the camera forward, but I’ve also heard some other users say that left-right works better, which makes sense to me at face value.

I’m mainly focused on capturing things like business signs and house numbers that tend to be on the right side of the street, so I like to face the front camera to the right. This also helps with the limitation of displaying a 360 degree image in a rectangle, because it makes sure the angle I want to capture isn’t split in half, like the back camera is.

Unfortunately I haven’t secured a sponsorship yet, I’ll have to reach out to them :P

That’s a very cool project! I was just wondering about the viability for importing this data, but it seems like there’s quite a long thread discussing EU vs US copyright law here:

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/is-the-license-of-alltheplaces-suitable/99999/33

It doesn’t seem to have been resolved, so I guess it’s not viable even for US data.

Thanks! That page was helpful for how to format the documentation. I added an explanation of my import process and the tag mapping here:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/HIFLD/Public_Health

I got through the state of Virginia today. I should probably document that somewhere…

Awesome work! I took a look at SherbetS’s walkthrough, but didn’t want to learn how to use QGIS.

Instead, I wrote a script to pre-process the Hospitals GeoJSON into OSM tags where possible. It also uses a python library usaddress to parse address strings, which I think is more robust than the regex approach described in that workflow.

https://gist.github.com/wcedmisten/a6f8b695d4d744c0aedfa2785b5d72f5

After processing the file, I just used the JOSM workflow described in this post to import the data.