Memoto Life-Logging Camera Delayed (But Gains Digital Compass)
The Memoto wearable camera project is making lemonade out of delay lemons, taking advantage of a hitch in GPS antenna design to slot a digital compass into the life-logging gadget. Issues with the GPS electronics requiring a redesign of the wearable's PCB have pushed back the estimated initial production run to the beginning of April at the latest, the Memoto team said in an email to Kickstarter backers, rather than February as initially expected.
"The exact delay is difficult to estimate but since we believe that the GPS is an important part of the Memoto camera, we really want to get this right before we ship the first batches" the team writes, arguably a sensible decision given the life-logging system is far less valuable if you can't pin down images taken by the camera to the location they were shot. Memoto envisages owners wearing the camera all day, keeping records of everything they see.
While the PCBs are being fettled by the antenna specialists, Memoto has used the time to slot a magnetometer into an unused corner of the 'board. That will allow for accurate directional data to be stored with each photo taken, encoding the direction in which the camera was facing to be recorded; the Memoto design already had an accelerometer, which will be used to calculate inclination and pitch of the camera.
"One of the ideas would be to allow you to create so mething like your own Google Street View since the app knows in what direction each photos is taken. We can also give you statistics of in what directions you are facing during the day and we are sure that some of you will come up with very cool applications of that. The compass data will be available through our API" Memoto
Meanwhile, the iPhone and Android apps are expected to be ready by the end of January, while the cloud-based backend is already operational. Memoto has also shared a couple of prototype/pre-production assembly videos, which you can see below.
Solder paste application:Component assembly:Component assembly 2: