An alternative for Nikon's SnapBridge, which provide GPS location to Z cameras via the bluetooth smart mode (the mode you connect with SnapBridge).
I own Z 50 II and Z 8 camera, and I'm living in China. China has a law to forbiden all cameras from having built-in GPS for some reason. A workaround is using SnapBridge to provide GPS locations. However, on my Samsung, it's not stable (often disconnected from camera), and consume a lot of battery.
With my new Z8, I'm thinking maybe I can made my own GPS using the 10 pin connector since it's talking NEMA-0183 at 4800 bps. But sadly the Chinese firmware blocks the GPS setting, so even you have Z9, which has built-in GPS, you can't use it.
So for me, and other Chinese users, SnapBridge is the only way to feed GPS into the camera and geotagging the photo.
The Android implementation is complete and ready to use. It is based on the reverse engineering from gkoh/furble, and has been verified to work with the Nikon Z7 II (and should support any Z camera with SnapBridge smart-device mode).
It can pair with new cameras and connect to saved ones over Bluetooth, inject real GPS (plus network location) into the camera, run as a low-power foreground service in the background, and automatically recover the SnapBridge device ID so you can switch between this app and SnapBridge without deleting any pairing records.
Full documentation is in android/README.md (中文版见 android/README.zh-CN.md).
- 中文版：使用教程
- English: Usage Tutorial
This Android section is maintained by HowenXu.
中文版：安卓端实现已完整可用。它基于 gkoh/furble 的逆向成果，已在尼康 Z7 II 上验证可用（理论上支持所有带 SnapBridge 智能设备模式的 Z 相机）。它可以配对全新相机并连接已保存的相机，通过蓝牙注入真实 GPS（含网络定位），以后台低功耗前台服务方式持续运行，并能自动恢复 SnapBridge 设备标识，让你在本应用与 SnapBridge 之间切换时无需删除任何配对记录。完整文档见 android/README.md（中文版见 android/README.zh-CN.md）。
- 中文版：使用教程
- English: Usage Tutorial
- 本 Android 部分由 HowenXu 维护。
Apparently Android's BLE and BT stack is not easy to use. Using it as a PoC defeat the purpose of clean code just focusing on the core features. So, as a backend developer, I decide to use whatever I'm comfortable: the good old JVM.
Currently the kotlin PoC can pair new devices (test with Z50II and Z8) and connecting to saved devices. Also can send fake GPS payload to the camera.
TODO: make it more robus? Like auto-reconnect when camera wakes up from idle. Also maybe connecting to multiple BLE devices?
The dedicated hardware runs on the ESP32. The original M5StackS3/CoreS3 idea was ruled out because the ESP32-S3 only supports BLE and does not have Bluetooth Classic, which the Nikon smart-device protocol requires for bonding. The original ESP32 has both BLE and Bluetooth Classic, which is why it is the target platform.
Moved from PlatformIO to pioarduino because platformio sucks. They stay at old version of arduino-esp32. The pioarduino fixed this.
The code is pretty much finished, it can pair new cameras, talk to a UBlox GNSS module, parse NMEA and send TIME and GEO payload over BLE. It supports multiple boards (e.g. M5Stack Core2 and ESP32 WROOM 32E); see esp32/README.md for details.
The Nikon camera LCD shows GPS coordinates in degrees + decimal minutes, the same format this project's M5Stack screen uses. However, the camera's rendering of the fractional minutes is buggy in some cases.
For example, a fractional minute of 51.002' is shown on the camera LCD as 51.2', not 51.002'. By contrast, 51.688' is shown correctly as 51.688'. The failure is not consistent — it appears to depend on the digits of the fractional part.
The value stored in the photo's EXIF tag is correct in both cases (verified with exiftool), so the geotagging is accurate. This is a display-only bug in the Nikon camera firmware, not a bug in this project's encoding. This is confirmed on both Z50II and Z8.
Contributions are welcome! Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for how to build the project, report bugs, and submit changes. Contributors are listed in CONTRIBUTORS.md.