Of course this applies to all other Social Connectors and new ones as they are developed.

This version eliminates the need for the expensive MC-35 and even the special 10-pin connector. I’ve opted for a quick GPS receiver and encased everything in a small black box with a flash shoe mount. Because it is powered through the camera’s power source, a switch on the side of the box turns off the GPS. Version 3 should include a battery, rechargeable through a USB connection.

Read on for directions on how to create your own GPS.

Parts List

1. 4.7Kohm resistor (x 2)
2. 10Kohm resistor
3. 2.2Kohm resistor
4. NPN Transistor
5. IC PC Board
6. SPST Micromini Toggle Switch
7. 3x2x1″ Project Enclosure Box
8. USGloblSat EM-406A GPS
9. Remote Cord for Nikon D200 – find a cheap (<$10) one on eBay
10. Small cable ties
11. Velcro with a sticky mount
12. Epoxy stick

Tools Needed

1. Soldering iron & solder
2. Wire cutters
3. Needlenose pliers
4. Exacto knife
5. Patience

Overview
It’s quite a simple project; just four resistors, a capacitor, the GPS, a switch and some soldering. The goal is to make it tight so it fits in a small enclosure that can be mounted on the camera. I prefer to do a dry run without any soldering to see how it all fits together; I would suggest you do the same.

Disclaimer
Although I have used this successfully with my camera, I cannot guarantee that it will not harm your camera, even if all directions are followed exactly. By constructing this GPS following these directions (or even using them as a basis for your own project), you do so at your own risk and agree to hold me harmless from any damage done to your camera.

Wiring Diagram
The wiring diagram depicted above is the top view of the PC board. My handwriting shows four resistors (r1, r2, r3, r4), a transistor (with emitter, base, and common leads), Red, Black, and White wires, and the six leads to the GPS (number 1 through 6).

Step 1
Attach the four resistors to the PC Board as shown.

1. R1 – 4.7K ohm
2. R2 – 10K ohm
3. R3 – 2.2K ohm
4. R4 – 4.7K ohm

Step 2
Attach the transistor to the PC board, carefully placing the base, common and emitter leads in their proper holes on the board.

Step 3
Attach a wire (preferably red) between the PC board and the switch. This will be used to cut off power to the GPS.

Step 4
Cut the switch off of the cheap remote cord to expose the measly three wires in it. If you happen to have a 10 pin connector with ten wires then you will have to do things a bit differently.

Attach the red wire to the other terminal of the switch. Note the picture depicts a SPDT switch and has an additional terminal. You can choose to leave the switch out as it is a bit obtrusive on the box but doing so will keep the camera active and drain the battery quickly. Alternative, you may prefer a switch with a lower profile such as a slide switch.

Attach the black and white wires to the PC board. The location of the white is depicted with a “w” in the wiring diagram although the picture should help to clear up where it goes.

Step 5
Take the six pin cord for the GPS and cut off one end. I made the mistake of cutting it in half, giving me a much shorter span of wire to work with.

Attach the black wires, numbered 1 through 6 to the locations on the PC board. Wire 3 is connected to the emitter and wire 6 to common of the transistor. The other four wires should be readable.

Step 5a
Solder the connections on the underside of the PC board, if you haven’t done so already. I like to fit everything together first and when I’m happy, do the soldering and then snip the extra wire. You can see from the image that I am not an expert solderer; just make sure that the solder does not stray.

Step 6
Attach the GPS to the PC board using velcro, connecting the white 6-pin connector to it.
Wrap a wire tie around the wire and through a hole in the PC board, make a tight connection to provide strain relief. This is a very important step because if it is not done, one tug on that wire will disconnect something on the PC board making the GPS inoperative.

The device is finally beginning to take a recognizable shape!

Step 7
Create two holes on the long side of the enclose, one to fit the wire through and the other to hold the switch. Make the hole for the switch the size specified for the switch. Remember both the switch and wire will be on the same side as the 10-pin connector on the Nikon body with the switch to the front of the box. If the holes will be different sizes, pay careful attention to where the holes are made.

Step 8
Carefully insert the PC board, wire, and switch into the enclosure. It should fit in there tight. Make sure to secure it to the box if there is anything loose. You can screw the top cover onto the enclosure; we are almost done!

Step 9
This is the tricky part: making the connector. With an exacto knife, strip off the rubber on the 10-pin connector of the cheap remote cord. The goal is to get the plastic piece with the 10 holes and three pins. With patience, the rubber can all be removed and the pins extracted. The pins must be located in different holes than their original location. You’ll want to cut the wire to a size that would ultimately fit between the enclosure and the camera with just a little bit of slack.

Ultimately the wires are connected to the pins in the following sequences. This image is looking into the barrel of the connector.

1. White wire – pin 1 (receive)
2. Red wire – pin 3 (power)
3. Black wire – pin 7 (power ground)

You’ll want to hook GPS power to pin 3 on the camera which always has +5V while the camera is active; note that by keeping the GPS on, this pin will continue to have a +5V supply as receiving the NMEA data keeps the camera active. Using pin 2 to power would keep the power to the GPS flowing even while the camera is off and this would be sure to drain your battery quickly.

It takes a bit of patience and luck to extract the pins, clean them, reinsert in the correct location and solder the wires to the pins. Be careful as the pins are often numbered looking into the connector although you will be soldering on the outside of the connector.

Step 10
Once you have confirmed everything is correct, plug it into your camera and turn the camera on, making sure the switch on the box is in the on position. You should start to see the flashing GPS symbol on the display of the camera within a few seconds. If you don’t, turn off the camera and disconnect the connector and recheck your work. After a bit, the GPS symbol will stop flashing and will be solid (you may need to have a clear view of the sky for a lock to be made). At this point all we need are a few finishing touches.

Carefully disconnect the module from the camera. To make the connector secure, fashion some epoxy in the shape of an elbow connector around the bare wires and the 10-pin connector making sure to secure the pins in the connector. Make certain to leave enough room on the connector to plug it into the camera (about 1/4″). Also, make the elbow bend such that it lines up with how you want your cable to flow. Hopefully you can do a prettier job than I did!

Finally, to make the mount, fashion one out of a hot shoe adapter or take the mount from the bottom of an old, broken flash and mount it to the base of the case. This will give the GPS a place to sit while taking photos. You may need to get creative with how to attach it. The next version will need to add a flash mount on top of the GPS so we can use the GPS and flash at the same time.

Good luck! I look forward to hearing your results and would love to see pictures of your projects.

Being a new father to twins and often pondering the potential cost of education has guided my thoughts on this podcast. We desperately need a shift in the education paradigm; I’m not sure I’ll be able to offer a decent education for my children considering the current college trends. I imagine removing the walls of the learning institutions and replacing them with social networks. And as technology removes the language and distance barriers, social networking can be the driving force behind sharing knowledge – there are so many bright people all over the world.

I also thought about the Borg (Star Trek’s Next Generation version of a highly functional social network) and how a primary goal is to get smarter though collective thinking. Social networking can be used as the medium to add brainpower to solve problems. I would hope in the years to come that the focus of social networking is to share information allowing us all to get smarter.

I am able to capture the engine load at a point in time. What if I calculate an average load for a commonly traveled route? I can then take variations of that route and determine which path minimizes the impact to the car. I could factor a lot of variables including time, distance, average engine load, gas consumption, frustration, etc. I could then determine a set of heuristics that could suggest the optimal path.

This could be useful for frequently traveled routes like to and from work daily. Or any other profession that does a fair amount of repetitive automobile travel. I believe the software could just sit there gathering information with little input from the user. This would allow it to collect a vast amunt of info and make decent determintions based on user preferences.

If I have high-speed Internet access between the two homes this problem should be trivial to solve. All it takes is tunneling the dial tone across the Internet. How awesome it would be to have a box that I could plug in at home and connect my phone line and a network connection. Then, in the vacation home, I can take a sister appliance and plug into it a phone line and network connection. Even better would be some type of proximity configuration so the two appliances could discover and validate each other. The only task left after that is the tunneling of the dial tone and possibly dealing with being behind a NAT router, both of which are not difficult problems to solve.

The process would be divided into the following areas:

1. Style guidelines
2. Theme selection
3. Content development
4. Production

Style Guidelines

Guidelines would be developed by the users and would be easily available to the authors. The guidelines would direct the style of writing allowing for some conformity in a novel authored by many people. Guidelines may also specify the type of novels produced (science fiction, romance, mystery, etc.). The guidelines are the key to producing a successful novel and must be made easily accessible to all authors, editors and reviewers.

Theme Selection

Users would offer very high-level plots or story lines into a theme pool. That pool would generate interesting themes through a voting and bubbling effect, similar to how stories appear in Digg. The most interesting themes would then be developed until a compelling story line has evolved.

Content Development

The content for the novel can be developed in a wiki-like environment. It would consist of many people contributing story elements and others putting them together, following the high-level outline created during the theme selection and conforming to the style guidelines. Allowing all users to develop and edit content within stated parameters would combine the creativity of many and most likely be greater than the sum of its parts. The site would be self-governing giving the users ultimate control in the outcome of the novels.

Production

A creative commons license could govern the release of the novels turning these user-generated novels into the hands of many. Electronic publishing methods are many and easy to execute making distribution a snap. There are also many options available for printed materials with on-demand printing and publishing available at many web sites. Viral marketing would be a natural byproduct of the process and guaranteed, interesting content would broaden appeal.

Combining style guidelines with an easily accessed and easy-to-use, collaborative environment could possibly create many "best sellers." The tricks are concise guidelines and the right environment.

Why not utilize a coupon system over SMS in addition to product placement or promotion to sell products on Internet distributed videos? There are some very bright and creative people out there creating free content for video. Why not entice them to advertise a product and make some money at the same time?

Here’s how it works, using this Starbucks Addict video as an example. Ann (the video’s author) publishes some incredibly witty and clever video that somehow draws thousands or hundreds of thousands of people to watch it. Part of the video advertises Starbucks and there is a coupon offer associated with the video for 10% (or whatever) off.

So far, pretty simple; now to mix in SMS. I saw an article about using your phone as your wallet recently and I put these two ideas together.

Extending the example: to entice both parties to deliver, a single-use coupon code is created that uniquely identifies the offer. A hash is generated that identifies the author of the video, transaction number and expiration date. Of course, the author needs to get a registration key from Starbucks that authorizes the coupon. If the viewer decides they want the coupon, it can be SMS’ed to their phone and stored there. When time comes to use it, the viewer enters the Starbucks and text messages the coupon code to the store which automatically registers the coupon code and credits the video author’s account and also issues the discount for the item. The credit could be a flat fee or a percentange of the item. Everybody wins. The author gets credit for their creative talents, the viewer gets a discount and the product company gets some free advertising. And as a freebie, this method also allows for establishing some excellent metrics by tracking the coupon codes.

This can all be done with existing technology and it would be quite simple to do.