Blue2CAN GPS and Nikon D Series Cameras

Red Hen Blue2CAN for Nikon D3 and D300 GPS cameras review
Article by Mike Barrett
March 29, 2008

Pocket GPS World

Last year Nikon announced the latest in their range of Digital SLR cameras, the D3 and D300. These are targeted at the top of the range with a price tag of £3400 for the D3 (yes that is three thousand) and a slightly more affordable £1300 for the D300.

Red Hen Systems have produced a tiny Bluetooth adapter that connects to a bluetooth GPS and transmits the GPS data to the camera: the Blue2CAN. The Blue2CAN retails at $279 USD.

Both new Nikon cameras have a special 10 pin connector which amongst other functions allows you to connect a GPS to the camera. This then provides a NMEA datastream from which the camera can extract the positional information and stamp the image meta data with the location that the picture was taken.

In the last year I have reviewed a number of GPS systems that offer a mechanism to match GPS tracks to digital photos. Whilst these do work they add an additional step into the workflow and the possibility of errors creep in with each additional step. The beauty of this system is to have the camera stamp the image when the shutter is pressed.

To get started the Blue2CAN and your Bluetooth GPS need to connect to each other. Technically this is known as pairing.

The Blue2CAN should be attached when the camera is switched off. As soon as you switch on the adapter's LED will flash 3 times within a second and will then start looking for GPS devices. If it doesn't find a Bluetooth GPS then it will go to sleep for 20 seconds and then search again. This will continue until it manages to pair with a GPS. There is little feedback during this process and it can be a little disconcerting whilst waiting for it to happen.

Once paired you need to tell the camera to record the GPS position with the image. This is achieved by pressing the menu button, selecting GPS, then "Auto meter" then select "enable".

I was amazed how simple Red Hen had made this process. The main issue with Bluetooth devices is getting them paired, for some reason it is either simple or very complex. I am fortunate enough to have over 20 different Bluetooth GPS receivers and in my tests only 3 failed to connect to the Blue2CAN. These were a Globalsat BT-359, a B-Speech GPS 20C and Evermore BT GPS receivers. I suspect that this is because they need a passcode to pair.

Another interesting feature is that even if the camera is switched off the Blue2CAN will still remain active and paired to the Bluetooth GPS receiver. This enables it to instantly have the connection when the camera is switched on, a great idea! Unless of course you use the GPS with a phone or a PDA. The GPS can only connect to one device at a time. It took me a while to work out what had gone wrong with my PDA navigation, with my camera in the boot of the car the GPS was still connected so my PDA couldn't get a connection. I overcame this by luck by switching the GPS off and on again.

Although the Blue2CAN is constantly powered whilst connected I found there was more than enough power in a charge to take hundreds of pictures over a 3 day period (some including the built in flash) and still have about 30% left in the battery.

The Red Hen Systems Blue2CAN is a Bluetooth adapter for the high end Nikon digital cameras allowing the connection of a Bluetooth GPS receiver. The compatibility of the adapter was impressive, working seamlessly with a huge range of Bluetooth GPS receivers.

The installation and setup is simple and required no technical knowledge. If you are capable of operating one of these Nikon cameras then you are well over-qualified to set up the GPS for the camera.

Tibet in the News - Spreading the Word

Tibet News...

Auto-tagging - Faces with Places

http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9816371-39.html

Get ready for a new era in which your camera knows not just when you took a picture but who's in it, too.

Many cameras today can detect the faces of those being photographed, which is handy for guiding the camera to set its exposure, focus, and color balance properly. But the more difficult challenge of face recognition is more useful after the photo has been taken.

That's because of a concept called autotagging, one of a number of technologies that make digital photography qualitatively different from the film photography of the past.

Tags of descriptive data can be attached to digital photos, and they help people find and organize pictures. The only problem is that tagging your photos, today a laborious manual task, is like eating your vegetables. It's good for you but a lot of people don't like it.

With autotagging, the camera attaches tags as the pictures are taken. Today, cameras embed timestamps in photos, which makes it possible to sift through pictures by date. But be honest here--how reliably can you remember exactly when you took that picture of your darling daughter a year or two ago that you'd like to e-mail to her grandparents? Being able to screen for photos only of a particular person could dramatically speed up the search process.

One camera maker willing to mention its interest in autotagging is Panasonic. "A lot of thought is going into how to tag photos so you can retrieve them at a moment's notice," said Alex Fried, national marketing manager for imaging at Panasonic's Consumer Electronics Co. But he wouldn't go into specifics: "There are things we have in the works that will help benefit consumers going forward."

And faces aren't the only aspect of autotagging that's likely to show up in cameras. Location, too, is another useful attribute that can be attached to photos through a process called geotagging. Geotagging can be used both to look for photos whose location you know and to figure out what exactly is in a photo you already have at hand.

Today, geotagging is generally a laborious manual task that requires geographic data to be merged with photos after the fact using a computer. But more power-efficient approaches will lead to in-camera GPS systems that will enable automatic geotagging, predicted Kanwar Chadha, founder of GPS chip designer SiRF Technology.

"A location stamp is much more important than a time stamp in most cases. A year down the road, you have no idea where those pictures were taken and no way to search for location," Chadha said.

A short story on Panoramio

Panoramio Beautiful Geo-Images (blog)

"To see our small project grow from its birth for year and means has been a hallucinating experience, with this step and the continuous support of the users, we hoped that it grows still more." (translated from spanish by Google) - Jose, Joaquin and Eduardo, May 31, 2007

(c) Kyryrl

Eduardo's spainsh Blog - Look him up on via Google and you can get a translation too! (Eduardo writes Panoramio's Changes/Innovations Blog)

September 20th, 2007 by Eduardo Manchón

Yesterday 300,000 new photos from Panoramio were added to Google Earth, that means that the total number of photos in Google Earth is 2 million right now.

August 21st, 2007 by Eduardo Manchón

Good news! Finally photos up to ID 2,900,000 have been added to Google Earth. This means that more than 500,000 new photos have been added to Google Earth and this is the biggest update we ever did. Now the total number of photos from Panoramio in Google Earth is 1,7 million. Next update will be around September 20th.

June 27th, 2007 by Eduardo Manchón

Yesterday around 200,000 new photos were added to Panoramio’s layer inside Google Earth. Now the number of photos from Panoramio in Google Earth is around 1,2 million. With some exceptions, photos up to ID 2,000,000 have been included. This means around 2/3 of all photos uploaded to Panoramio up to this ID have been sent to Google Earth (e.g. photo with URL: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/1892099 has ID: 1,892,099).

If your photo has a higher ID than 2,000,000 you need to wait some weeks until the next update, expected for middle July, that will be larger and I hope will help catch on the delay.

June 27th, 2007 by Eduardo Manchón

Only three months ago we announced that Panoramio had reached one million photos. Today I am very happy to write that the number of photos has doubled and reached 2 million.

May 31st, 2007 by Eduardo Manchón

We are very (and we mean very) happy to announce that Panoramio will be acquired by Google.

April 24th, 2007 by Eduardo Manchón

Finally the new update is done. We sent to Google Earth a selection of photos up to ID: 1,710,000. Approximately 3/4 of the photos uploaded to Panoramio were sent to Google Earth. Thas is almost one million photos (973,949), the double number of photos than the previous update that reached ID: 655,000.

February 17th, 2007 by Eduardo Manchón

Today Panoramio’s layer at Google Earth was updated. Previously there were 80.000 photos from Panoramio visible in Google Earth by default, now 400.000 photos are included. There is a great chance to find photos from almost every place on Earth.
The selection of the 400.000 photos included photos until ID:655.000

December 11th, 2006 by Eduardo Manchón

Official Google Blog announced last Saturday that Google Earth has added a new “Geographic web” layer that includes articles from Wikipedia, comments from GE community and photos from Panoramio.

August 25th, 2006 by Eduardo Manchón

Thomas de Lange Wenneck has a GPS attached to his camara. When he takes a photo the coordinates of the place are automatically stored in the EXIF information of the image file. Later he just needs to upload his photos to Panoramio and they are automatically located in the map. No need to map the photo manually with Panoramio’s drag and drop interface.

July 5th, 2006 by Eduardo Manchón

We were adding some new features to Panoramio the last week:
- Photos with geodata in EXIF are automatically located in Panoramio, so you don’t need to do anything but upload the photo if it has the GPS coordinates in their EXIF tags.
- Mislocated?. Suggest a new location: Since there are many people correcting wrong

November 28th, 2005 by Joaquín Cuenca Abela

He asked, I deliver.
Do you have a ton of photos that you want to show in a map? Worried your pictures will soon fade away from the home page of panoramio to some hard to find page?
Now you can restrict the photos in panoramio to those of a particular user.

October 23rd, 2005 by Joaquín Cuenca Abela

Stefan Geens suggested to publish a KML Network Link with the latest pictures of Panoramio.
I did not know what is a KML Network Link, but it sounds cool, so I looked up the documentation, and implemented a KML Network Link for Panoramio.
How does it work?

September 27th, 2005 by Joaquín Cuenca Abela

Some people have asked in the forum for a way to have Panoramio on
their site. So I went for an easier solution for all of you. I just
cooked a mini panoramio version, ready to be used on iframes outside
Panoramio.

An example is:

This is what you need to write in your site:
<iframe src=”http://www.panoramio.com/plugin.php?
lt=43.406295&amp;ln=-2.686586&amp;z=3&amp;k=1″ width=”446px” height=”300px”></iframe>

GeoTagging With NIKON

Put a Billion Dollar System to Use

From Zombie Dinosaurs by Dave Johnson... you know the one?

A few years ago, I went on a little photo trek and showed off the photos. I vividly remember getting grilled about the various locations by a friend of mine. “Where were these taken?” she asked me about a particular set of photos. “Hmm,” I replied, “I don’t remember. I took so many photos, I can’t keep track.” If only there was some automatic way to tag my photos with location information, so they’d be able to tell me where they were taken. Yet another thing I’d never have to remember ever again!.....

I’ve recently been experimenting with what is surely the most elegant geotagging tool ever made. I’m talking about Red Hen’s Blue2CAN.

In my experience, a better geotagging solution does not exist. It’s a small gadget about the size of your thumb that plugs into a small port on the front of several Nikon Digital SLRs, including the D200, D2X, D2Xs and D2Hs. It communicates wirelessly to any Bluetooth GPS receiver (like the kind that comes with inexpensive navigation programs and sits on your dashboard).

More on Blue2CAN - Camera Area Network for Nikon

More on BLue2CAN - Camera Area Network for Nikon

The Blue2CAN connects automatically (and silently) to ANY Bluetooth GPS in range (within 10 m of it's location) The idea is that in the rare event there is more than one Bluetooth GPS in range that any one will do as it's "close enough". However these receivers only connect to one device at a time, so the GPS device must be on, in range, and NOT connected to something else, it's most likely yours. If the GPS is separated from the camera Blue2CAN loses the connection and starts searching again. If the same one, or a different one comes it range it uses it. The advantage is that it is AUTOMATIC, and therefore easy to use.

Connection speed is not really a problem because the Blue2CAN stays connected to the GPS as long as the GPS receiver is on, even when the camera is turned off (yes, Blue2CAN gets power from the camera even when the camera is off). In this way the GPS data is available immediately when the camera is switched on. Note that it is best to turn the camera off when you’re not shooting because the GPS does hold the meter on (Nikon's design) and the meter takes quite a lot of power. Fortunately Bluetooth takes very little power so it does not put much of a drain on the camera battery in any case. The drain is so small that the D200 camera battery can keep the Bluetooth radio working for more than 25 days (and nights). GPS takes a LOT more power, so the batteries in the Bluetooth GPS device will probably not last more than about 14 hours.

If the Blue2CAN is not connected to a GPS when the camera is turned off it will search for 10 minutes longer, if no GPS if found it will turn itself off. It will start searching again when the camera is turned on, and takes about 5 seconds to connect in this case. It usually takes GPS receivers at least this long to get a fix from power up, so when the GPS data is available the Bluetooth is already connected. I'm sorry if this description was too complicated, but the complexity was necessary in the implementation to both manage power and make sure no GPS data was missed when a picture is taken...

The two real advantages of using a Bluetooth GPS instead of a camera powered GPS are that 1) the power systems are separate. And 2) the GPS antenna can be placed in a good position regardless of where the camera is.

Power: The GPS must be on all the time to “keep a lock” otherwise you have to wait for the fix before you take a picture (not a good use model). The GPS takes a lot of power, so it can put quite a drain on the camera battery, if the GPS battery goes dead you can still take a picture, it just won’t be geo-located.

Antenna: To maintain a fix the GPS antenna must have a clear view of the sky, if your shooting from inside a car or other vehicle it’s better to have the GPS on the dash than on the camera. Also if the camera is “stored” between shooting where it will not “see” the sky, a camera mounted GPS will loose lock and may take to long to re-acquire when you get the thing out to take a shot.

Red Hen does offer a camera mounted GPS unit for the D200, D2X as well, it's called the "DX-GPS" we’ve had it available for some time, these are the things we’ve learned from use and customer feedback.

Nikon GeoTagging DX-GPS

The Red Hen Systems DX-GPS is an integrated solution for tagging Nikon digital still images with GPS data. Using a consumer, off-the-shelf GPS, Garmin Geko 301 unit and the industry leading Nikon D2Xs, D2X & D200 camera, the DX-GPS allows users to directly capture geospatially referenced images in the easiest, most reliable collection method today.

Information captured in the EXIF metadata of the JPEG image file can be read by Red Hen Systems’ MediaMapper and PixPoint for ArcGIS to create map features linked directly to the photo file.

Features & Benefits

• GPS mounts on top of the camera putting it in full view of satellites for maximum accuracy.
• Records Latitude, Longitude and Altitude data to EXIF header of each JPG image.
• Physical integration provides for hands-free use.
• Instantly inspect and view GPS data on the camera LCD.
• User interface on GPS allows for setting adjustments, verifying satellite acquisition and accuracy.
• Industry standard GPS-data tagging offers compatibility with most GIS systems.

Requires a Nikon D2Xs, D2X, D2H or D200 camera.

One Billion Cameras -

What Happens When A Billion People Worldwide Become Equipped With The Tools Of Visual Communication?

In the past four years the number of cameras in people’s hands worldwide has increased by 600%. It will double again over the next five years. Total number of cameras of all kinds sold in 2000: 85 Million units. Projected 2008 sales: One Billion units. Pervasive, web-connected imaging and the explosion of user-generated visual content are transforming how we communicate with each other in our personal, work, and community lives.

What happens when a billion users of many cultures, and scores of engineers and entrepreneurs, focus on new ways to enrich customers’ lives through imaging? What happens when R&D is fueled by an order-of-magnitude increase in economic reward? And what happens to the industry’s business models and value formulas?

FutureImage - 6Sight

Barefoot Disaster Pointography

Red Hen Systems has a growing list of international users. In the
immediate moments after an natural disaster confusion is the norm as large
effort is expended to realize the extent and severity on the affected
communities. Spatial multimedia or the indexing of images, video and
audio tied into building of a minute-to-minute dynamic map of that
information as provided from the field then immediately sharing and
distributing that content via the web. Sort of bare-footed-CNN
as an effective pathway to insight and conditions in the immediate
aftermath. Reality is connected to place, access can be understood, and
the immediate needs of triage addresses. A hard reality would be to
claim this content as near-real-time citizens "disaster-casting". This
sort of on-the-sport at the moment personal notice and will likely become
more a feature of our daily awareness than less.

Red Hen Systems wants to help harness and enable geo-photographers,
photo-geographers, and all those skilled in every-day pointography to help
accelerate accurate information to assist all in understanding those
affected, to enable effective timely assistance, and help document the
good, the bad, and ugly of recovery. Sort of big stuff but we are going
to give it a fair go. Interested?


Dartmouth
Flood Archives

As a first step, Red Hen is going to try to enable those of our clients
and any of you with interest and skill and likely guts to assist in the
geo-tagging of this critically valuable information, essentially those willing
to do this sort of "on-call" work, to jump-in and
help, to cross-list on volunteers and commercial outfits
willing "to do first" and "talk later" basis via the following site:

Emergency
Geotagging and Disaster Mapping

ISDE5 - aka International GeoTaggers Conference?

Calling all photo-geographers, geo-photographers, and pointographers!!
.


The "earth first" potential of the NASA/Google alliance takes on additional significance given the wide blog-o-sphere announcement of the International Symposium on Digital Earth get-together in San Francisco in this coming June.

On June 5th 2007, the 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth (ISDE5) will open in the Bay Area of San Francisco, California, USA. The symposium will span four days and will address a broad national and international audience across a spectrum of industry, academic, government, and citizen attendees. All individuals who share a common interest in the concept of a digital Earth are urged to participate and attend. The Digital Earth vision embraces a philosophy that any citizen of the planet, linked through the Internet, should be able to freely access a virtual world of information and knowledge resources.

This philosophy supports the dream of ubiquitous education for the people of the planet. A rich convergence of technological advances, active visionaries, and recognition of the paramount need for humans to better understand the Earth and its systems comprises the character and history of this dynamic and exciting enterprise.

This international vision encompasses the virtual and 3-D representation of the earth with vast amounts of scientific, natural, and cultural information that is partially referenced and interconnected with digital knowledge archives from around the planet to describe and understand the Earth, its systems, and human activities.

The Digital Earth community is dedicated to building a virtual global commons to promote "down to Earth" solutions supported by cooperative web-based protocols using standards, databases, analytical and visualization tools that will foster the creation of appropriate applications for a sustainable future. A consortium of global experts founded the International Society for Digital Earth in 2006 to promote the evolution and implementation of the Digital Earth vision.

5th International Symposium on Digital Earth

ISDE5 Nominations

I would like to nominate two candidates that should be IMHO noted contributors to the "down to earth"contributions.

Global Biodiversity Information Facility
(with Google Earth bio-mash)

The GBIF GE Bio-Mash - or where are all those critters?/

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility is building a Internet accessible link to literally millions of "specimens". Most of the world's biologic diversity is located in the developing regions where as the dominate archive of those bio-diverse regions are held within developed nations. Essentially the GBIF is geotagging as much of the known via Google Earth. Put a time line on the collection and its classification and patterns may emerge? Give a HOOT! Don't pollute!

Good managers of natural resources and policy-makers know that their best decisions are based on results from the most accurate scientific analyses. Such analyses are based on solid, documentable data that have been recorded directly from the observation of nature. Such records are called 'primary' data. Biodiversity is a handy, one-word name for all the species on the Earth, the genetic variety they possess, and the ecological systems in which they participate. Another way of thinking about biodiversity is as the 'living resources' portion of 'natural resources'.

A large part of the primary data on biodiversity are the 1.5 - 2.0 billion specimens held in natural history collections, as well as many geographical and ecological observations recorded by various means and stored in various media. In making living resource policy and management choices, decision-makers are often forced to rely on analyses that are not based on primary data. This is because the world's store of primary data about biodiversity is not at present readily and easily accessible.

Biodiversity is found around the world - there are micro-organisms between granules of rock 3 km below the Earth's surface, rootless plants in the Atacama Desert, thousands of species of beetles in a single rain forest tree. However, biodiversity is not distributed evenly across the face of the planet. An estimated 75% of all species are found in the developing world.

Information about biodiversity (natural history collections, library materials, databases) likewise is not distributed evenly around the globe. Three-quarters or more of data about biodiversity are stored in the developed world. However, most of the data that may be needed can't be transferred because either they are not digitised, or capacity to handle digital information is lacking, or both. Facilitating digitisation and global dissemination of primary biodiversity data, so that people from all countries can benefit from the use of the information, is the mission of the (GBIF).

Conservation Air Patrol
(With National Geographic geotagged images)

Conservation Air Patrol

My second nominee group, the Conservation Air Patrol, transverses Africa counting animals, documenting environmental degradation, and from what I hear swatting flies while getting the job done. Read about then add the National Geographic "MegaFlyover" to your Google earth via National Geographic and Wildlife Conservation Societies, “MegaFlyover”. This team plus National Geographic should be considered as enabling one of the original Mash-up".