Ricoh Theta S ‘Little Black Box’ Adds Functionality to this 360 Camera | @theta_official
Here’s a fun interview with retired aerospace engineer Bob White about the functionality he added to his Ricoh Theta S, with the aid of a Raspberry Pi Zero W, Class 10 64GB MicroSDXC card, Adafruit PowerBoost 1000C, and a smörgåsbord of open-source software packages; including Bob’s Python code available here on GitHub.
I had wanted to dabble in 360 photography and after researching the available cameras in the market I started to narrow down my search using cost, image quality and API availability. In my mind the Ricoh Theta S was the clear winner.
The Theta S might have scored a little lower then some on available memory and available power but I was impressed with the API. Don’t ever try to sell me a piece of electronics without an API. How is one expected to add any product customization without an API?
After taking a few pictures with the Theta S to validate the reviews that I had read about the camera I dug into the API in an effort to see what it could do. I decided to use my iPhone and an app called Pythonista which is a Python editor/interpreter to write my scripts. I had barely gotten started investigating the Theta S API when I read about the “THETA Unofficial Guide 360 Time-Lapse Video Challenge.” The challenge was to find ways around the ThetaS 200 image storage limit and battery capacity limit.
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