Using a Raspberry Pi for In-Car Capture and Upload

Contributing and equipment
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Hi, all.

I received an email, saying that the Raspberry Pi 4 has just been released. This got me thinking, has anyone used a Raspberry Pi and camera, to capture and upload images? I saw some old guides, from 2015, but wondered as things have moved on, whether anyone has tried this recently.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Chris

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Would be possible to do, but why. A good smart phone or action cam is cheaper and easier to use.

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I don’t know about cheaper. I think it could be done for less than USD $200.00. But with the easy availability of inexpensive, high-quality action cams, I agree that it definitely would be a project one would undertake for its own sake more so than for any practical reason.

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Thanks, all; good point, well made, although I’m intrigued by the possibilities of Dride.

Cheers,

Chris.

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I wrote a small script that continuosly captures pictures: raspi/autocapture.py · master · ltog / photomapping-utils · GitLab

I run it on the Raspberry Pi Zero using the official Raspberry Pi Camera v2. It’s fast enough that I found it necessary to add an artificial delay between captures.

Pictures look like this: Mapillary

The script doesn’t do geotagging and uploading yet.

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Good quality images, it would be great if they could be automatically geotagged. Good work!

Chris

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I use an DIY raspberry camera in car. Wrote also an Python script, but it is very crude and not published.
Geotagging is possible and works.
But there is one thing to keep in mind: Don’t use gpsdemon!!
The coordinates you get from gpsdemon are valid for one second, sometimes even more. In this time you travel some distance in your car. And you dont know if the last measurement was 0.1 or 0.9 sec before.
The far better way, but more complicated, ist to read the NMEA stream from the receiver, look for valid coordinates and then take a picture as fast as possible.

I don’t use the raspberry for upload. Better way for me is to save the pictures on an USB memory stick. The stick will automatically mounted on startup.
The script will take care of stopping the capturing when not driving, create a new subdirectory/sequence after tunnels or similar and calculate the direction.
So after driving i can take the memory stick, plug it in the pc and upload the pictures via script with little extra effort.

3 Likes
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It would be great if you could share your setup and scripts.

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Wow - cameras are getting better for the Raspberry Pi.

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Im writing a Programm which captures Images from multiple Cameras (Webcam/DSLR) and decode NMEA. But i need Help to find a Mapilary Upload API. The result should run on any PC or Raspberry. Can anybody Help me?

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