The Raspberry Pi is everyone’s favorite computer and it has an official camera attachment that’s available for $25. Some people are already using this new camera for the Raspberry Pi in pretty cool ways. Dave Ackerman made a cheap, DIY camera for the Raspberry Pie and sent it above earth to snap pictures of our lovely planet.

Ackerman had to make the rig as light as possible so the Raspberry Pi could fly across the world. He built a lightweight craft in which the Model A was contained, then it was attached to a balloon and parachute. Ackerman also set Pi’s camera to take three types of pictures once per minute, a small and medium sized picture to be sent to a wireless receiver, and a larger-sized photo that was saved to an on-board SD card.  There is also a tracker installed, so that he could locate the rig after it landed and recover both the unit and the pictures saved to the SD card. This tracker was supposed to run on four AAA batteries, but due to the life of those batteries, Ackerman had to switch over to AA batteries so he could get it up and running for testing.

Once the Rasberry Pi landed, Ackerman was able to go and retrieve the rig thanks to the tracker, and grab all the high resolution images off of the SD card. Ackerman was able to grab some really great looking photos of the flight thanks to good weather and the rig flying without any problems. The flight took about three hours in total and flew over the UK at a height of about 29 miles.

Wonder what else the Raspberry Pi can do? This was pretty cool. Let us know what you think about David Ackerman’s plan with his Raspberry Pi in the comments down below and hit up the via link for some more photos.

[via David Ackerman, Geek.com]