The Perfect Tourist Techno-Cap

How many times are you out on vacation and neglect to take pictures to document it all for the folks back at home? Or maybe you forgot just exactly where that awesome waterfall was. [Mark Williams] has made a Raspberry Pi Zero enabled cap that can take photos and geotag them with the location as well as the attitude of the camera.

The idea is to enable the reconstruction of a trip photographically. The hardware consists of a Raspberry Pi Zero W coupled with a Raspberry Camera V2 and a BerryGPS-IMU. Once activated, the system starts taking photos every two minutes. Within each photograph, the location of the photographer is recorded like most GPS enabled camera.

An additional set of data including yaw, pitch, and roll along with direction is also captured to understand where the camera is pointing when the image was taken. Even if he’s tilting his head at the time the photo was taken, the metadata allows it to be straightened out in software later.

This information is decoded using GeoSetter which puts the images on a map along with the field of view. Take a peek at the video below for the result of a trip around Sydney Harbour and the system in action. The Raspberry Pi Zero and camera combo are useful for a lot of things including this soldering microscope. Hopefully, we will be seeing some DIY VR gear with stereo cameras in the near future.

21 thoughts on “The Perfect Tourist Techno-Cap

    1. Well for some pictures it may be useful to know the angle and orientation of the camera when the photo was taken. Perhaps not for finding a waterfall at a given set of co-ords.

    1. It will happen. Just wait until he goes off touring somewhere.

      Just an idea for some finishing touches:
      I’d double up on the hat to hide the ‘lectrix from the paranoid public. Lest I feel lucky. Especially in UK at the moment. Apparently the police have shoot first ask questions later powers for most if not every paranoid, “I thinks he are a terrarhest, he gots a bom-circuit strapped to his hat!” call the police may get.

      Forget prettying something to girlfriend-factor pretty, go way beyond and tart it up to doesn’t get mistaken for a bomb level of pretty.

      Also water-proofing things a bit from the waterfall.

      I’m assuming the maker of this project has already thought of the above ideas/issues and planned these extras for his project by the time it is complete…

    1. Excellent point, it seems it;s up to us to find a way other than magic to power it.
      Assuming the original uses magic of some sort.

      Still an interesting site and writeup though. But the power is always the issue with wearables, not just for us hobbyist but for the trillion dollar company Apple too for instance. Same with Google and their wearables, it’s always the power that is an issue. So leaving that out as if it isn’t needed will make any device look great.. on paper.

      Without needing power so much would be possible with present day technology, which is often only thwarted by the need for power. Sometimes for good though, with all the spying and weapons and nastiness, it makes you wonder if you should wish for better power sources or not.

      1. Not according to the surprisingly large amount of people that publicly admitted their intent to commit assault and battery upon anyone they see wearing google glass. Their only complaint was being recorded and photographed while in public.

        1. That’s true (about the not wanting to be recorded), however why arnt they beating up the drivers/riders with accident cameras attached to their car, bike, bicycle?
          Though it is possibly due to the direction and/or intent of the recording… i.e. not taken into a building still recording… etc, I guess.

        2. I hate those people. I mean I really hate those people. I wanted Glass to succeed because I hoped mass production would bring it down to a price I can afford. Or.. at least it would attract the Chinese knockoffs. The kicker is I don’t even care about the camera feature. That was never my thing! I just wanted it for the display.

          i’m far from weak but if I were bigger, really big.. intimidatingly big I would totally walk around town with a pair of mock Google glasses just to see those dbs squirm when they see someone wearing glass that they are afraid to attack.

Leave a Reply to btyCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.