If you want a hassle free way of geotagging your photos, plugging in a GPS
module into your camera is the best way to go. Coordinates are stored in the
photo's meta information as soon as you take it, no additional post-processing
required. However, Nikon's original GPS module, the GP1, is quite expensive with
a price tag of about 260$. That's why I've decided to build a low-cost DIY
version which performs exactly the same but uses much cheaper components. The
full building instructions including schematics and PCB layout for the DIY
module can be found in my nikon-gp1-diy repository on
GitHub. The assembled module is
extremely small and fits perfectly onto the camera body thanks to a hot-shoe
mount. Just plug it in, wait for a GPS fix and start shooting photos, it
couldn't be easier than that! The total cost for the DIY module is roughly 40$,
much cheaper than any commercially available alternative that I'm aware of.
My latest addition to the google-maps-api-addon
library is the PanoMarker, a marker which is able to remain at a
fixed position inside of a custom StreetView panorama. It can be used to
annotate points of interest (POI) inside a particular panorama regardless of the
user's viewing direction. The difficulty in creating a marker that remains at a
fixed position lies in the projection from a spherical panorama to a
two-dimensional viewport. POIs are adressed in terms of heading and pitch angles
with respect to the panorama's center. The viewport uses good old pixels for
positioning elements. In this article I will elaborate on how to find the pixel
coordinates on the viewport given heading and pitch angles of a POI.
One thing I was working on during my internship at Google was a beautiful new look for Checkins. The extension I now made* takes map images shown in such Checkins and replaces them by an actual map which you can zoom and drag around!
You may remember the SimpleMarker class I made about a year ago. Recently, I started working with the Maps API quite a lot again since I'm currently writing a Google+ extension with which you can get a map of your circles. During development, I realized that an update of my marker class was long overdue. Not anymore ;-)
During this summer, I have improved the firmware of my GPS-Logger more than ever. Most important, the firmware as well as the RawRead-tool is now completely available on GitHub. By that, everyone can participate in making them even better. Here's what I have changed during the past weeks.
