As part of a “disruptive technologies” course at the United States Military Academy, [Roy D. Ragsdale] produced a working prototype of a Google Street View-like system called PhotoTrail. Like its corporate-backed inspiration, the system captures georeferenced 360-degree panoramas that can be viewed interactively in a web browser…but at a hardware cost of only around $300. [Ragsdale’s] prototype is based entirely on consumer-grade off-the-shelf components and open source software, all tied together by the yin and yang of DIY: foam core board and a few Python scripts.

This article from IEEE Spectrum magazine provides some background on the selection of parts and construction of the system, including a hardware shopping list and a list of links to all of the open source packages used.

The PhotoTrail prototype is surprisingly small and lightweight. A vehicle isn’t even required; the camera array can be carried overhead by a single person, making it possible to capture remote locations. But [Roy] expects future revisions to be even smaller and less obtrusive, perhaps mounted to a headband. Mount Everest awaits!

Lifehacker’s [Gina Trapani] has one of Flickr’s photo bikes and wrote up how it works. As you ride, the bike automatically takes photographs, geotags them, and uploads them to Flickr. The handlebar unit contains a Nokia N95 cellphone. The rear is a solar powered charging unit. It has a custom python script that starts the photo taking sequence when it detects the bike is in motion using the phone’s accelerometer.

Most of the engineering seems to be for usability’s sake. We’re guessing they probably wanted to disguise that they’re bolting a $600 cellphone to a bike as well. Out of the box the Nokia N95 already does almost everything required. It has a 5 megapixel camera with an interval timer that can vary from 10 seconds to 30 minutes. It supports Flickr uploading, but with software like ShoZu you can streamline the geotagging and make all uploads automatic. Just build a solid mount for your N95 and you’ve pretty much got it, and when you park your bike you can take the phone with you.

A camera called Pet’s Eye View hangs from your pet’s collar and takes photos in your choice of 1, 5, and 15 minute intervals. While the concept is good, the execution is poor: it can only take up to 35 images at 640 x 480px with no other resolution options available, and it has no expandable media slot. We also dislike the lack of GPS tracking, but wouldn’t really expect that for the $45 price.

For GPS pet tracking, Garmin has recently introduced their Astro System, which consists of a collar with a GPS and a tracking unit. Like most Garmin GPS product, this one is functional, full featured, and a great match of function and technology. We like live pet location tracking, we just don’t have $600 to spend on keeping tabs on the dog.

A homemade solution we like a lot more than the two commercial ones is [J. Perthold]‘s CatCam. Starting with a $20 keychain camera with a 1.3 megapixel resolution and an SD card slot, [Perthold] removed the casing and connected the board to an Attiny2313 microcontroller programmed to trigger the camera periodically. He built a small lightweight case for his modded camera and strapped it to his cat, [Mr. Lee]. This works out to essentially the same product as the Pet’s Eye View camera, but at least twice as good by almost every applicable metric.

One thing we love about the CatCam is the fact that it uses SD media. If you were to use an Eye-Fi instead of regular media, you could have a camera that is superior to the Pet’s Eye View and does geotagging all in one package. It’s not as useful as true live GPS, but at least you’ll know exactly where your pet went when you collect the photos. In addition, if the dog is still within your home network’s range, you should be able to see images as they stream in. If building an Eye-Fi enabled CatCam is too much work, consider using and Eye-Fi with CHDK in a Canon camera. This will give you the timed photography and the geotagging in an easy to build package. Hopefully you pick a small camera unless your pet has a strong neck. You could use some of time-lapse photography techniques we posted earlier to time whatever device you end up using.

The WiFi uploading Eye-Fi SD card made a big splash when it was first introduced, but now Eye-Fi has a whole line of different products. The top of the line is the Eye-Fi Explore, which supports geotagging without using a GPS. Instead of GPS hardware, it uses the Skyhook Wireless Wi-Fi Postitioning System, which correlates the position of the Eye-Fi’s access point to GPS locations, creating virtual GPS functionality. This allows photos taken with the Eye-Fi to be be geotagged. Of course, the accuracy of the system is noticeably lower than true GPS and seems to be affected by a number of external factors, but it is still accurate enough to tag the photo within the immediate vicinity of where it was taken.

WiFi positioning is great feature, but certainly not limited to photography. Since the Eye-Fi is at its core SD storage media, you could probably have it geotag data saved to the card, even if it wasn’t created by a digital camera..