Components Coming Together

Again I apologize for being late on blogging. Unfortunately my accident included some damage to my eye. My sight is almost back to normal. I had double vision for some time : C

Main Components have come together:

My goal is to automate the processes as much as possible. I already have the camera installed with dropbox and now can load the pictures to the cloud and access the pictures on my laptop and Blackberry.

We were given the Raspberry Pi B+ and the Raspberry Pi2 to design our concepts with. The night camera is on the first Raspberry Pi 2 with the Microstack GPS unit. This is a great design if you have not purchased one you should try it out. The speed is 6 times faster. The cable ports have been changed so you have a nicer alignment of cables for power and display. I tried but could not get the accelerometer to work.

The second Raspberry Pi contains the GertBot and a second camera. The GertBot will be used to control a robot chassis to provide movement. I will be using something like this from Amazon. I know I will be stacking some boards on top of each other but my roommate and I will figure out the logistics.

The third Raspberry Pi contains the PiFace Control and Display. I wanted to use the display for something cool related to the project. I decided to try Snap Camera and could now control the camera without a keyboard or monitor or mouse. May be a fit for the project.

When the application boots the top left corner shows how many pictures have been taken and the upper right shows how many pictures can be taken. The bottom left shows the mode and the bottom right shows the options for that mode. By pressing the rocket switch you can take a picture.

Navigation:

I played with a variety of GPS data from the Microstack GPS unit. I did run the command and went for a walk with the GPS unit:

gpxlogger –f test.gpx

This was the result when I uploaded the .gpx file to Google Earth:

But I don’t want to have to upload the .gpx file manually. I want an automatic upload to Google Earth from the Raspberry Pi every 5 seconds to show the position and path of the Raspberry Pi. So I set up a kml file to refresh Google Earth with the location. I also loaded the Google Earth plugin to access the location and path on any smart phone. The latter I’m still working on. Here’s a pic of the kml file at work. Not what I expected! I took the Pi for a short walk and seen to be all over the place. Okay more to come !