Nikon's latest round of cameras support BLE, and I'm wondering (assuming the Nikon supports geotagging over BLE) would it be possible to pair the watch and send BLE packets with GPS data. I know I could register a position listener and pump the location over to the camera, the question really comes in with pairing. Everything I'm reading in the API docs seems to indicate the watch will only pair with a mobile device.
That simplifies that, but let me add another wrinkle. There is a distribution of android for raspberry pi, a pi zero and a BLE module could in theory be installed with android. In that case, would the android SDK be enough to connect to a watch over BLE? I could push location data out to this android device at that point right? From there I could push the location to the camera via a wired connection.
If all of this seems crazy, I'm looking for a low cost solution to use the watch as a GPS instead of one built into the camera or one on a phone, because both are notoriously bad for battery life.
Yep, I'm aware of similar options, but the added step in that sort of workflow is kind of a pain. I realize this is a lot of hoops to jump through, but call it an intellectual exercise.
That simplifies that, but let me add another wrinkle. There is a distribution of android for raspberry pi, a pi zero and a BLE module could in theory be installed with android. In that case, would the android SDK be enough to connect to a watch over BLE? I could push location data out to this android device at that point right? From there I could push the location to the camera via a wired connection.
If all of this seems crazy, I'm looking for a low cost solution to use the watch as a GPS instead of one built into the camera or one on a phone, because both are notoriously bad for battery life.
That kind of time-consuming jury-rigging won't be any better. Better to use a decent-quality phone, and carry a good quality external USB power cell in case you run low. Then you'll have a good phone, lots of runtime, and won't have wasted loads of time trying to encapsulate a Pi Zero (which are still in very short supply, in any case). Over-complicating things will lead to frustration, in this case.
Even if you could find the Pi Zero in stock, the fact that it's cheap would compare unfavourably with the time cost- unless you secretly want to do this for the primary purpose of entertaining yourself by tinkering, rather than immediate results. If that's the case, go for it, and enjoy- there's nothing wrong with tinkering :)
You might be able to do this just by using an Android phone, but I don't know enough about Android to know if it is actually possible.
If you write a companion app for CIQ on the phone that receives GPS location from a CIQ app, you would have the location data on your phone without turning on its power hungry GPS radio. I don't know if you can push that location into the Android system in a way that would allow it to provide it to the Nikon Camera. If you can connect directly to the camera from the same app and send position, that might also work.
If position can be seeded into the Android system from an app, then a CIQ app/Android app pair that does that seems like a cool thing someone could do that would have applications beyond this one.
