Hello.
I’ve got a Gear360 2016 really cheap used from Amazon to play a little bit with it. The image quality is amazing for the price, but everybody who tried it knows that there isn’t a good way to capture images in a regular interval. Hardware Setup
If you search for a few minutes than you stumble over this video Hacking Samsung Gear 360 for 8K 360 timelapse - YouTube where a remote shutter is soldered to the shutter button.
The idea to use a cheap intervalometer is great, but I didn’t want to void the warranty and didn’t like the cable on the camera. So I did the same modification but not to the shutter button on the camera but to the shutter button of a Bluetooth remote.
Now I desoldered the three wires from the big black external cable and just removed it completely. The two wires from the Bluetooth remote were soldered to two of the now empty pads like shown in the picture below.
To get the cases of both devices closed i cut small notche in each case for the wires and closed both cases up. As a last step I hot glued them together with a piece of plastic in the back for more strength (be carefully not to glue shut one of the two batteries compartments)
Software
Stitching of the images is a little bit tricky, the phone is too slow and I wanted a software solution which works on every platform. I found this project GitHub - ultramango/gear360pano: Simple script to create equirectangular panorama by stitching images from Samsung Gear 360 which uses hugin to stick the panoramas.
I used this script as base and added an automatic correction of pitch and roll with the help of the embedded meta data. I also wanted to automat geotagging. But as you can’t set the date and time manually of the camera, I’m not sure how feasible it is.
I am not as good as a programmer to make a super clean program out of it. I will publish the scripts as soon as they are ready to everybody who is adventures enough to try my messy code. But I will give you a second way to try it. I’ve setup everything in a clean ubuntu virtual machine and I will upload it as soon as it is somewhat usable so you can just run the virtual machine without any more setup.
A first test sequence on mapillary will follow tomorrow or the next few days, my PC is stitching.
My initial though was, can’t you create a Bluetooth timer with some app, but looking more into it it is not that easy. Apparently the Gear360 acts like a HID Bluetooth device, and Android has only since version 9 software support for that.
That would be awesome, but I am not that familiar with programming in that area. And the hareware remote hack was like a two hour project for me and i needed a little bit try and error to find the right connections.
And after a few days of use I can say it works really reliable. I took about 5 thousand shots on the bitke it.
