# Raspberry Pi Camera Attachment... GPS?



## Caps18 (Jan 31, 2013)

http://davidhunt.ie/?p=2641

This is a very cool implementation of a Raspberry Pi into a Battery Grip. It basically puts a Linux computer right on the camera with a connection through the USB port. 

Since I would like to get to the point where I can add GPS coordinates into my photos as I take them, what do you think the chances are of attaching this device, having the photos go to the Raspberry Pi, adding in the GPS stream parsed into Lat and Long, and then writing the data back to the Compact Flash card? 

The other things it can do would be nice too.


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## Area256 (Feb 1, 2013)

That's really cool!

I think adding GPS would be fairly easy. You wouldn't need to transfer the photos to the Raspberry Pi, just have the Raspberry Pi log GPS data with time stamps, and write it into the EXIF data on the card periodically. 

I'm sure someone has already fingered out how to attach a small low power GPS to Raspberry Pi. 

The problem with this setup could be the battery life though. I'm not sure it would as practical as say logging GPS data with your phone, and combing latter in LR. Having said that, I think this project is awesome! And I'm going to have to try some Raspberry Pi + camera hacking.


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## brianboru (Feb 1, 2013)

I recently picked up a Raspberry Pi. My justification was that I could make a photo backup station on the cheap as I don't have a useable laptop at the moment and the pre-made solutions seemed too expensive.

So here was the build list: 

$35 for the Pi, 
$7 for a Case
$11 Shipping and Tax on the Pi and Case
$15 for a really good USB hub
$10 for a WiFi adapter
I already had a USB CF reader,
4G SD card,
and a 300GB USB drive.

While I intend to use it on AC power I did prove that I could create a setup using external battery packs to power the system. 

I first installed vnc and happily have it working headless with either my tablet, phone or home computer acting as a display. I installed gphoto2 and ran into the same usb bug as David Hunt (the gentleman in the link) ran into. I used the same usbreset utility to work around the problem. Once I had that done, I could plug my cameras in and happily copy photos, thumbnails or use the gphoto services to take pictures. 

Now the down side - each 25MB raw file was taking about 12 seconds to copy to the hard-drive. That was with the mild overclocking on the Pi. I had the same performance using a usb-CF reader. I reformatted the usb-harddrive, created a swap space on it and made the main partition on it ext4. Once I enabled the hard-drive swap, my copy time is now a "swift" 9 seconds per raw. I prefer the external usb-CF reader as I can use rsync to copy just-the changed photos over without writing my own wrapper to gphoto. 

I've set up a few more services too - I've installed s3tools so when I have an internet connection it can be sending things to the Amazon s3 cloud as another backup.

All and all I'm please in a geeky sort of way.

Here's an ugly iPhone picture of the setup:


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## brianboru (Feb 1, 2013)

Oh. To do GPS annotation, you are probably going to be happier to use a GPX logger on your phone like:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gpx-master/id406096613?mt=8 
or a dedicated unit like one from Halux. 

Then do the actual photo geotagging in post: 
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/creative-suite-podcast-photographers/how-to-use-gpx-logs-to-geotag-your-photos-with-lightroom-4/


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## Caps18 (Feb 1, 2013)

I just don't do post processing in a normal fashion. That is what I would like to get away from. It can be months or years before I get back to looking at the pictures I take. I enjoy taking pictures more than looking at them. 

I would worry about the battery life issue. It would be nice to connect the phone's GPS with the Raspberry Pi and then have it write to the EXIF data...


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