I Love Cynics!

As Greg pointed out in a comment to my last post someone has worked on a project similar to mine. I have to say, their solutions are much more elegant than my own. So, in the spirit of design, I’m gonna totally steal a bunch of their ideas. The use of a dedicated camera breakout board will simplify my project tremendously. I’ve postponed working on that part of the project for two reasons. One – my camera died and I hadn’t bought a new one yet. Two – I really had no idea how I was going to accomplish turning on the camera, focusing and then taking a picture. I had a kludgey idea of using servos, but that was overly complex. Another idea was to find a bluetooth enabled camera, but that would likely be spendy.

The JPEG Color Camera breakout board from SparkFun eliminates this problem. The only downside is that the images will be of a lower resolution than an “off the shelf” digital camera. For this project, that’s a compromise I’m willing to make. And the fun of these breakout boards is that should a better camera come along, it should be relatively easy to replace.

There are two other aspects of the JARV.org project I’m going to utilize. First, since size is a concern in my project, I’m going to switch to the Arduino Pro Mini, a smaller version of the microcontroller that I’ve been using. Additionally, I’ll be switching from the SD card format to the microSD format using this microSD breakout board, also from SparkFun. I still get a kick out of how small data storage has physically become in the past decade. That you can fit several gigs worth of data on something no bigger than my fingernail is amazing to me.

Since I still want the display from my eTrex Garmin, I will be retaining its use, so the work I’ve done so far is still valid. I’ll still need the conversion circuit, but I can get rid of the bulky GPS datalogger shield I’ve been trying to get to work. Let’s face it, with essential tremor anything I have to solder is suspect. I’m happy I got the conversion circuit working, but I still can’t figure out where I failed on the datalogger. Everything I’ve ordered now has been prebuilt. No more relying on my crappy soldering.

One other aspect of the JARV project really sold me on their design. The JARV project injects the GPS data directly into the EXIF data of the images. I was going to simply tie images with a text file that corresponded to each image. I expect roughly 600 images from my trip up the Dalton Highway this summer. That’s a lot of images to cross-reference with GPS data. If the data is already tied to the images in the EXIF data, a lot (and I do mean A LOT) of time will be saved.

Placed the parts order yesterday. Oddly, it seems every time I order something from SparkFun, I do it right at a holiday. Despite that, they’ve always done a really good job getting things here quickly, doubly impressive since it seems like it takes forever for anyone else to send stuff to Alaska.

I want to thank Greg for pointing me towards the JARV project and John at JARV for paving an easy to follow path.