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Take photos/video when in area

Posted: December 2nd, 2021, 6:40 pm
by wdaehn
Imagine the following scenario:
  • Camera is on a tripod at the bottom of an interesting segment of a ski slope.
  • Now you would need a camera man who starts and stops recording whenever I am in view.
  • instead my phone broadcasts its GPS position and whenever I enter a predefined area, the camera starts recording and when I exit the area it stops recording after a n-seconds safety interval.
The naive approach to that would be to connect the Unleashed with the phone and an app on the phone turns the camera on and off. This would have multiple drawbacks:
  1. The range is too short. Must be in the 100m or more and reliable.
  2. Often we ride as a group of 5 people. Recording should run whenever any of these people is in the zone.
  3. No feedback when far away, e.g. sitting in the chair lift and checking how many seconds the last recording was, when the last recording was, etc.
The solution with the least amount of hardware would be a second phone which talks via the Unleashed to the camera. It reads via LTE/5G the current state of all smart phones registered to this Unleashed. On the riders smartphone an app tells the server the GPS coords.
Latency would not be an issue as you can draw the area always larger than actually needed. Checking every second is more than enough.
Later this "second phone" could be a tiny hardware utility, e.g. ESP32 NodeMCU.

Maybe this is something you want to consider.

Re: Take photos/video when in area

Posted: December 9th, 2021, 11:09 pm
by Oliver
Interesting Idea!
But also very specific! And I don't know how many people would leave their expensive Camera unattended in a place like that ;-)

I'll think about how this would be applicable to some more common usecases and how it could be solved to work for all of those.