If you live out in the boondocks, out of reach from the Google Maps car, you might have noticed there aren’t too many pictures of your area on the Internet. Mapillary is hoping to change that with crowdsourced photos of the entire planet, with mobile apps that snap a pic and upload it to the web. [sabas1080] is bringing this capability to the most popular ARM dev board out there, the Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi is not a phone, the usual way to upload pics to Mapillary. There’s no GPS, so geotagging is out of the question. The Pi doesn’t have a camera or a screen, and if you’re taking pictures of remote locations, a battery would be a good idea.
All these pieces are available for the Pi, though; [sabas1080] sourced a display from Adafruit, the camera is a standard Raspi affair, and the GPS is a GY-NEO6MV2 module from the one of the numerous Chinese retailers. Add a big power bank battery, and all the hardware is there.
The software is where this build gets tricky. Mapillary has a nice set of free tools written in Python, no less, but this is only part of the build. [sabas1080] needed to connect the camera, set up the display, and figure out how to make everything work with the Mapillary tools. In the end, [sabas] was able to get the entire setup working as a programmable, mobile photo booth.
That would’ve been nice when I was seismographing in the Jordanian desert, but that was almost 30 years ago…
>Add a big power bank battery, and all the hardware is there.
Where’s the phone hardware for uploading the data then?!
I was looking for that part as well, but let’s just say he used Ethernet for this one. I google translated the uploading part of his instructable, but no GSM/phone hardware was mentioned, although the photo above you can see that he’s using Ethernet.
Part of the reason I chose to live “in the boondocks” is to avoid crap like having the entire world knowing whether or not I cut my lawn or not. Consider this a big, fat NOPE from me.
Others may feel differently, but I value my privacy, what’s left of it anyway.
That’s what I was thinking, who wants to ruin the few last crumbs of privacy.And by having all that info out there invite unwanted visitors too.
But then I recall reading about google buying that low orbit satellite thing to get almost live sattelite-streetview at some point.. and I get depressed. Let’s hope the tech is flawed.