Thread: gps enabled camera

Lol yea I read about that too. Pretty crazy what they are coming up with. Give it a year or so and you'll be able to get one for $100 bucks. By then they will have cameras built into your eyes that take pictures after you blink and wirelessly send it to your computer and print out a list of prints for you when you get back to your house.

Good find

I'm writing a small app to do just that, but which inexpensive USB webcams, and other usb-based video devices. I might add in DSLR control support (USB 1.1 and 2.0) eventually, since I have a Canon Digital Rebel (300D) and a 20D.

As of now, the app opens mdi windows (windows inside a main window) for each video source it automatically detects as connected. You can save snapshots to disk of any video source, or have it take snapshots of all videos sources at once (and then you have the option to merge them side by side into a single image for easy storage if you want... eventually, I might write some panostitching in).

I'm writing the GPS connection and parsing code as we speak. Once that's done, I'll make it add gps exif data to all the pictures. And then GPS track logging and uploading to a website/database (with the pics too).

Main purpose of this program is that I mounted many cameras around in my car aiming out to the street, and I want to catalog pictures of downtown areas for use in some of my other projects, rather than have to take pictures of each place by hand. There are plenty of uses though, like being able to visualize your daily route.

Anyone interested in this?

I think it would be a cool idea. That way you could (with a ton more programming) construct 3-D images of a street or cityjust by driving though it, and hitting record.

Very cool. Here's the data I would like to be coded in a picture:
1. Date/Time (easy, most cameras already do)
2. GPS coordinates (what we're talking about)
3. Digital compass reading (the direction the camera is pointing)
4. Tilt angle indication (the degree to which the camera is tilted. Use a piezo gyro, they are down to IC size).
5. A universal notation for the width of the current field (eg, to figure out how far it was zoomed in).

With this data, you could build a 3d Mosaic of... anything. This data would be eminently mappable over any terrain data to provide fierce levels of precision.

Originally Posted by Chairboy

Very cool. Here's the data I would like to be coded in a picture:
1. Date/Time (easy, most cameras already do)
2. GPS coordinates (what we're talking about)
3. Digital compass reading (the direction the camera is pointing)
4. Tilt angle indication (the degree to which the camera is tilted. Use a piezo gyro, they are down to IC size).
5. A universal notation for the width of the current field (eg, to figure out how far it was zoomed in).

With this data, you could build a 3d Mosaic of... anything. This data would be eminently mappable over any terrain data to provide fierce levels of precision.

Chairboy, features noted, I'll have features 1, 2, 3, and 5 added in. Although I'm not sure how to get that information yet. I'd do 4 if you make the circuit for me.

Oh, by the way, I smell the ability to construct your own street-level picture based navigation in the near future Although sharing your image data with others online would be so damn difficult (huge images).

Any other features we're forgetting?

I could make a circuit for #4, sure, but it might not be practical for large scale. I've built things that sample the ADXL202 accelerometer for the drone/autopilot I built a few years ago, but it was a real pain in the circuits. I'll look around to see if there's anything premade that can be adapted cheaply.

In regards to the GPS coordinates in the pictures, it would be really useful if the coordinates were in machine readable format. Eg, use one of the non-displayed information fields in the image to store the coordinates so that you wouldn't have to mess with OCR or manually type in the coordinates. If they were overlayed onto the picture AS WELL, that would be fine, as long as there's the machine readable version embedded.

PS, for the purpose of carputing, the tilt sensor really isn't needed. It would be something I'd want in a handheld digital camera. Also, the idea of sharing the data by long/lat would be supergreen. Imagine the possibilities...

yeah kepp us posted....seems like an interesting project