Camera GPS

Another project I work(ed) on was the camera GPS. The idea is that when you take a picture, your camera tends to send a signal to the flash port, which could trigger the flash if necessary. A very simple flash port just has an on/off switch, which could be hooked up to a GPS to record the current date, time and place so that you can later associate the picture with this information. The board shown here actually used to be a prototype for the servo controller featured elsewhere in this blog, but was modified to communicate with a gps. On the board you can see a 7-segment LED display in green, an on/off LED, a 24LC512 external EEPROM to store the results, a PIC16F628A microcontroller, an RS-232 input port that would hook up to the GPS, the usual 6-pin ICSP and a 74HC125, which seems useless but was used to hook up a smaller GPS module that worked on 3V. There is also the obvious 7805 power supply with 9V clip. This, as well as the software for the GPS camera controller, will all be explained in more detail in later posts, first another picture of the prototype hooked up to a camera (a Minolta X700 in this case, which worked really well).