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Morning! Not sure about the rest of you but I'm finally getting over a nasty cold that took me out for the week. Which gave me time to think and randomly sketch randomness. So here's my problem I hope I can get some experienced users advice.

I want to build a panorama camera rig for a 'vehicle' with custom software for compiling the images and then storing them into an online database. The rig consists of 6 cameras mounted at 60* intervals on a mount. The cameras are controlled by a single unit. The unit uses a gps to gather location and distance traveled from a previous 'snap' location. Every X meters it'll snap a new set of images, compile the images, stamp them with a gps location then upload to a database for later use.

I've been looking at the raspberry Pi and it looks like one solution for my design. My questions for any experienced Pi users:

1) Would I need a separate PiBoard for each camera and then a final one to gather the images?

2) Preferred camera Library? I've seen some Python scripts, but I've also encountered picamera which looks like it might be more suited? Suggestions?

3) Is there an easier less costly way of rigging 6 cameras together using RasPi?

4) Or is there an alternate solution to RasPi that I could use?

I've read up on several projects that use multiple cameras. Even one where someone developed a 3d scanner from about 21 RasPis+cameras. I've been looking for an excuse to buy one of these and play around with.

Looking for expert input, thanks guys!

1. Depends on how many GPIO pins are required by the camera, but you shouldn't need one board per camera. Maybe 2 or 3 depending on how may cameras you can attach to one board.

2. the PiCam is probably the better choice for this. It's pretty cheap and really easy to setup and use.

3. Instead of buying 6 PiCams, couldn't you just buy one, attach it to a rotor?Then hook the camera and the rotor to the pi, control them both. This way you can stop at a spot, rotate the camera 60 degrees, snap a picture, rotate again.

4. As far as boards go, there's a few other boards that have a bit better specs, but for the price, the PI has the best build quality.

I hope any of that was of some use.

Thanks for the reply!

1/2) I've seen the Picam, you can even buy both board and camera as a set. Looks like you can only attach one cam per board though. I was looking at the Python commands and it looks easy to jump in right away. I was also looking at some libraries for more interactive control.

3) Problem with that is the 'vehicle' doesn't stop per say..sometimes it can reach high rates of speed. So I'd need to snap all 6 shots at once.

4) Far as I can tell, it is the cheapest route. If there was someway to build a program in agk to handle 6 bluetooth cameras or something, that would be awesome.