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News and stories from The CodeBug Team

New CodeBug/RPi3 ‘Hat’ brings 360° photography to Raspberry Pi 3 Launch

If you’ve seen our Bullet Time Rig, or our Twittering Birdbox, you won’t be surprised by the slightly crazy looking creations we invent with Raspberry Pi. We’d wanted to build a camera that took instantaneous 360° pictures for some time, but the technology simply wasn’t available...until now! The new wireless networking capability of the Raspberry Pi 3 allowed us to network a ring of cameras without bulky wires or network switches, while the simple, compact display of CodeBug showed their status.

And of course the natural place to test the new rig was at the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3, 34 floors above London at The Shard. See what the launch was like for yourself. Scroll around the picture from the hat below and see how many famous faces you can spot.

If the panorama viewer doesn't work in your browser you can view the full panorama image here.

The hat is built from 8 of the new Raspberry Pis, 8 Pi Cameras, and 8 CodeBugs mounted on a custom laser cut rig attached to a yellow hard-hat. Pressing button A on a CodeBug tethered by USB cable triggers the cameras. The 8 CodeBugs surrounding the top of the hat then initiate a colourful countdown inviting all around to strike a pose for the picture. The images are copied over WiFi to a laptop that stitches them together instantly into a panorama. With the 8 cameras evenly placed in a circle to capture a full 360°, nobody can be camera shy!

With Raspberry Pis, cameras and a ring of brightly flashing CodeBugs strapped to our heads we looked like something out of Back to the Future! Needless to say, we had a lot of strange looks from Londoners on the tube. CodeBug Hat on train home

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