This smart globe shows you the entire world – illustrated by your own images.
Your recent trip to the other side of the planet was amazing, and you just can’t wait to show everyone the hundreds— thousands? — of photos you took. There’s only one problem—nobody else really wants to see them.
Fortunately, there’s a DIY solution for everything.
This one requires a bit of coding and electronics, but the end product is a way more interesting way to showcase your travels. Maker Caroline Buttet built a smart globe that’s wired to display vacation photos when someone taps the country where they were taken.
The way it works is simple: a thumbtack is pushed into each country where photos were taken. A wire connects to the pointy end of the tack on the inside of the globe, and touching the tack creates a capacitive touch detected by an Arduino.
There are a number of ways to go from here, but Buttet translated those capacitive touches into keyboard signals, and built a website to display photo albums based on those signals. The globe also features a rotary encoder that lets viewers cycle through the photos in the album by rotating the globe on its axis.
This is a project that requires a lot of soldering and coding, but it’s an undeniably amazing way to show off your last trip to the Bahamas.
Source: Caroline Buttet via htxt.africa
This article was originally written for and published by Popular Mechanics USA.
