Super awesome Layer Cam project!

Why are you taking this picture? It’s already on the Internet!

28 million of people visit Paris every year, taking dozens of pictures each. Every building, every statue has been captured, under every sky and every light.
Because billions of pictures of the Eiffel tower have been taken, I am sure that you can find matching cloud patterns in dozen of them, even if taken years apart.
Pictures have been taken with simple pin-hole camera, smartphones or with the most complex and expensive large format silver film camera or DSLR, and lots of them are now online.
On the Internet, those photographies are sprinkled over the city, with some areas densely covered, and other more sparsely. Each website is like a stratum of pictures of every kind: postcards, paintings, photos, satellite images…

Layer cam is a project to tap into those layers, like a drill extracting a core sample of images.

Based on a Raspberry pi, connected to the Internet through wifi and geolocalized by a GPS chip, Layer cam runs with Python code (mostly made from bits of code I found here (Martin O’Hanlon) and there (disasterjs) and taps into Panoramio API. The ‘Layer cam’ logo has been designed by Alice.

Hardware needed:

• a raspberry pi
• a breadboard & a couple of wires
• a 10 ohms resistor
• a push button
• an adafruit GPS chip
• a belkin N150 micro Wireless USB adapter
• a battery to power the pi & GPS chip up (a Duracell Instant USB Charger in my case)
• a screen (4.3 Inch LCD TFT Rearview Monitor screen)
• a rechargeable 9V battery to power the screen up, because I wasn’t able to hook the screen up on the pi 5v alim

Read more.

Featured Adafruit Product!

Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout – 66 channel w/10 Hz updates: We carry a few different GPS modules here in the Adafruit shop, but none that satisfied our every desire – that’s why we designed this little GPS breakout board. We believe this is the Ultimate GPS module, so we named it that. It’s got everything you want and more:

• -165 dBm sensitivity, 10 Hz updates, 66 channels
• 5V friendly design and only 20mA current draw
• Breadboard friendly + two mounting holes
• RTC battery-compatible
• Built-in datalogging
• PPS output on fix
• We have received reports that it works up to ~32Km altitude (the GPS theoretically does not have a limit until 40Km)
• Internal patch antenna + u.FL connector for external active antenna
• Fix status LED

…all for under $40! Read more.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!