Build Instructions

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• 1

  Hardware

  
  1. From a length of 10 cm PVC pipe cut roughly 60 - 70 cm of pipe. This will house the Raspberry pi and the Ricoh Theta housing will rest on top of this. Insert the wooden fence pole into the PVC pipe and mount permanently with some wood screws through the base of the PVC pipe. Leave plenty of room for the Raspberry pi and wiring. Cut the wooden post to length, with the top of the PVC pipe reaching your chin, and attach the ground anchor. At this point you can install the pole at the desired location, and run Cat5e cable to the location for PoE power (other power solutions are possible but not explored here). To avoid animals from entering the PVC housing it is advised to fill all holes with tin foil or plastic bags.
  

  2. Take the glass globe and set it in cardboard box with some rags, with the opening pointing upward. Place the PVC coupler over the base of the glass globe (this should fit - check the specs when ordering so that the mounting hole flange does not exceed the inner diameter of the coupler). Squeeze (black) silicon mounting glue between the outer flange of the glass globe and the inner PVC coupler. Silicon glue can be a mess, to prevent drops falling in the glass globe you can fill it with toilet paper or rags. Leave the glue to set before removing the glass globe from the box (or the rags from the inside of the globe). To prevent any water ingress use the same silicon glue to seal any outside gaps between the glass globe and the PVC coupler.

  3. Print the attached STL files using (black) PLA (or other stiff material). Using 3mm screws mount the top and bottom half of the PLA construction. A small nodge must be made in the top of the PVC pipe to make the construction fit neatly in the PVC pipe. This ensures that when doing maintenance you retain the orientation of the camera. If not you will need to align all the images, which is not a trivial task. A description on how to approach this should you have misalignment is given here.
  

  4. Install all required software on a Raspberry pi 3B+ (or more recent). For software instructions see below.
  

  5. Using the 2.5 mm screws delivered with the PoE shield mount the Raspberry pi onto the base of the 3D printed construction. Attach a micro-usb cable to the pi and run the cable through the base plate of the 3D printed construction to the top.

  6. Use 3 mm set screw to set the height of the Ricoh Theta camera within the construction. Depending on the model you can vary this slightly. Hook up the camera and turn it on.
  

  At this point you should be done and the camera should take pictures on a regular interval.
  

• 2

  Software

  
  On a fresh raspberry pi install clone the photosphere project, and run the install script. This will setup a cron job and put all scripts in the correct place. Nothing fancy here.

  git clone https://github.com/bluegreen-labs/photosphere.git
  sh install_photosphere.sh

  Change the `capture_sphere.sh` script in order to accommodate your own data storage solution (either local or remote). I used the rclone program to assign a remote drive (pcloud / onedrive / dropbox etc) where to store the images. I refer to the RClone webpage for the setup of such a remote location.

  https://github.com/bluegreen-labs/photosphere/blob/bc5c30d39588384626d564b43666abf1fd8baa18/capture_sphere.sh#L224

  Lines past 228 specify how I refresh a simple github page content to store the most recent image (which is a quick hack not to deal with cross site scripting requirements). You can adjust this to your own liking, or just delete if you do not need a live view.

  https://github.com/bluegreen-labs/photosphere/blob/bc5c30d39588384626d564b43666abf1fd8baa18/capture_sphere.sh#L228

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