It figures out how many photos are needed to complete the picture, when the stepper motors should be moved, and by how much and in what order and when and for how long the shutter should be opened – it also deals with the focus.

The Pi has a lot of computation to do here: Jack’s software ( which you can download on GitHub) works out the horizontal and vertical angles required, the camera sensor size, the length of zoom used and the image overlap required to stitch everything together into a tidy mosaic later on. This is the instrument box Tim is holding in the photo above, opened so you can peer inside. Tim and Jack Stocker thought this was daft, so they built their own out of MDF, some Lego turntables, and a Pi with a cheap stepper motor attached. You’ll need something approaching a defence budget if you’re going to do this yourself without building your own hardware, though I spent a few seconds googling and found that off-the-shelf motorised rigs for your camera can cost nearly $1000. But if you’re not in charge of a defence silo, you can still take your own gigapixel images by stitching together many megapixel-sized images from an SLR camera on a motorised mount into a giant, seamless mosaic with very fine detail. A gigapixel image is made up of (at least) a billion pixels, which means you’ve now got access to the sort of fine and vivid detail on your monitor that we mere humans with our shonky eyeballs could only dream of until recently.Īt the moment, a camera that can take a gigapixel image all in one shot is the sort of fantasy hardware that the military is pouring millions into. We’ve seen a number of photographers who have taken to the Pi as a way to bring down the cost of the sort of kit that was, pre-Pi, outside the budgets of mere mortals.

Gigapixel software