I Love Cynics!

Last winter I started on a project that would integrate a camera and gps into my motorcycle. The plan was to drive the Dalton Highway and have the system snap a picture every few minutes or miles. A few things put that plan on hold. First, I changed my summer plans and drove down to Idaho to visit my kiddos. Second, I broke the GPS. Oops.

However, now that winter is kicking in and my brain longs for something to do, I’ve resurrected the project. And, oddly enough, the GPS, too. Turns out, the only thing broken was the outer casing. I’ve removed the main-board from the case. That’s what you see in the above picture. Soldered on a battery pack, and it seems good to go. The overall build should be less bulky now, but I’ll have to find some way making the final enclosure weather proof.

When I shelved the project last spring, I hadn’t really made much progress. I’d found a circuit that would translate the RS232 signal from the GPS to TTY that the Arduino expected. It worked great when breadboarded, but as soon as I soldered up a final board, nothing worked. Even after going over all connections and making sure everything matched the breadboard, it still wouldn’t work. One of the last things I did was order the Adafruit GPS logger Shield. I’m hoping I can simply connect the output from the Garmin to this shield. If so, that’ll make things much simpler.

The steps then after that would be finding some way to trigger the camera. This would involve powering up the camera, focusing, snapping the shot and then powering the camera down to conserve batteries. That’s likely the hardest part. It’s also complicated by the fact that the camera I was using last winter is on its deathbed. Time to look for another cheap-cam.

The final part is to write the GPS data to the SD card on the GPS Shield. There are code examples out there of how to do this, so I suspect this will be fairly easy.

The end result? A photo trail of the trip with GPS data pinpointing each shot. There are easier ways to do this. Many cameras now integrate GPS receivers. But I like the learning aspects of this project. The many things you can do on the Arduino platform really intrigue me.