LEGO Photo Sphere Taker

In my free time, I bike around my neighborhood. One of my favorite spots is Congress Springs Park, located along Joe's Trail. This project started when I wanted to take a photo of "Frank's Rest Stop" which I happened to come across while biking the length of Joe's trail to see the Cox Reservoir which services my house.

I wanted people who were interested in the trail to see this cool stop, so I opened the google street view app and found that I could take a photo sphere, which I did.

While fiddling around in the app, I saw that I could join adjacent photo spheres to create a path, like google street view.

Taking a photo sphere requires concentration and takes some time, so I made this contraption out of LEGO to aid me.

I went through many iterations of mechanisms and ideas to come to this one. All in all, I think the building of this thing took 20-30 hours in total, most of the time making improvements to the mechanisms and finding a way to mount it to a tripod.

I encountered many obstacles during the build. One of the first obstacles was the accuracy of the turning of the phone. I need to be very accurate because of google street view's app design. One of the problems with LEGO is that there is a lax tolerance in technic pieces, so there was 5-10 degrees of play in the rotating mechanism because the worm gear could slide on its axle. To counteract this problem, I 3d printed some 1/6 bushings (5mm inner diameter, 7mm outer) and fitted them on. This provided a very reliable turning mechanism. However, I soon discovered magnetic interference of the motors caused the iPhone's internal compass to screw up, thus losing rotational accuracy again. This app was eventually abandoned in favor of occipital's 360 panorama (explained below)

Another problem I encountered was the app. Google's street view app has some funky algorithm which corrects for your movement. It is hard to explain, but in short, I could not use the street view app. I ended up using an app by occipital called 360 panorama which worked much better. One problem is that the quality is not that great... (Flat image resolution from the app is 4096*2048. Google requires 5600 by 2300). Used Preview to bump up the resolution.

The first 360: (Please choose to load unsafe scripts to see the panoramas... I think they are safe.) <FIXED>
Some I took in Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park(more coming):
Google Maps Joe's Trail (coming soon):
Video+Pictures coming soon