JP5056615B2 - Printer device, GPS orbit information recording system, and control program - Google Patents

Description

  The present invention relates to a printer device, a GPS orbit information recording system, and a control program, and more particularly to a technique for acquiring long-term GPS satellite orbit information used when recording a shooting position of a photograph taken based on GPS positioning information.

2. Description of the Related Art Conventionally, a portable electronic device including a GPS positioning device that receives a GPS positioning radio wave from a GPS satellite and measures its own position is known (see, for example, Patent Document 1).
In a portable electronic device equipped with this GPS positioning device, an ephemeris (Ephemeris) data included in a GPS positioning radio wave and almanac (Almanac) data as long-term GPS satellite orbit information can be obtained, and a receivable GPS satellite and It is configured to perform highly accurate positioning by specifying the positions of those GPS satellites and selecting the GPS satellites that are more optimal for positioning.
By the way, the ephemeris data, which is the position parameter of one GPS satellite, can be received even if the radio wave condition is not so good, but the almanac data needs to be decoded on the GPS receiver side, so the ephemeris data is received. If the radio wave condition is not better than the possible radio wave condition, reception is impossible. That is, if the radio wave conditions are the same, the almanac data is equivalent to being less sensitive than the ephemeris data.
Therefore, for example, in a room with poor radio wave conditions, ephemeris data can be received, but almanac data cannot be received.
JP 2007-68219 A

As described above, the ephemeris data is a position parameter of one GPS satellite that has transmitted the GPS radio wave. Therefore, if almanac data cannot be received due to radio wave conditions, ephemeris data of a plurality of GPS satellites that can be measured at least. It is necessary to continue the reception process until the data reception is completed, and much time is required until the reception process is completed.
Especially in a room, there is a possibility that the self-positioning may not be completed indefinitely due to the limited incident direction of radio waves.
Accordingly, an object of the present invention is to increase the effort of the user so that the self-position can be measured accurately and quickly even when the radio wave condition of the GPS positioning radio wave from the GPS satellite is bad. It is another object of the present invention to provide a printer apparatus, a GPS orbit information recording system, and a control program that can acquire long-term GPS orbit information in advance.

In order to solve the above-described problem, a first aspect of the present invention is a direct printing unit that reads out image information that is captured by a camera and recorded on a portable recording medium and prints it on printing paper, and direct printing on the printing paper. And a GPS information recording unit for recording long-term GPS satellite orbit information acquired through a communication network on the recording medium inserted for the purpose.
According to the above configuration, the direct printing unit of the printer apparatus reads the image information that has been taken by the camera and recorded on the portable recording medium, and prints it on the printing paper.
In parallel with this, the GPS information recording unit records the long-term GPS satellite orbit information acquired through the communication network on the recording medium inserted for direct printing on the printing paper.
Therefore, long-term GPS satellite orbit information to be used for the next shooting can be acquired by simply inserting a portable recording medium for direct printing in the printer device without the user being aware of acquisition of long-term GPS satellite orbit information. It becomes possible to improve the usability.

Further, a second aspect of the present invention is the first aspect, wherein the long-term GPS satellite orbit information is used at the next photographing with a camera having a GPS positioning function, and the long-term GPS satellite orbit information is referred to by the GPS positioning function. The photographing position information thus obtained is recorded on the recording medium together with the image information.
According to the above configuration, the user can use the long-term GPS satellite orbit information at the next shooting with the camera having the GPS positioning function only by using the direct printing function. It is possible to reduce the effort required for updating.
According to a third aspect of the present invention, in the first aspect or the second aspect, the long-term GPS satellite orbit information is acquired from a GPS server through the communication network.
According to the said structure, long-term GPS satellite orbit information can be acquired easily.

According to a fourth aspect of the present invention, in any one of the first to third aspects, the GPS information recording unit requests the long-term GPS satellite orbit information and acquires the information when the recording medium is inserted. It is characterized by doing.
According to the above configuration, the user can request and obtain long-term GPS satellite orbit information easily and reliably by simply inserting a portable recording medium.
According to a fifth aspect of the present invention, in the fourth aspect, the GPS information recording unit acquires the long-term acquired on the recording medium at a predetermined time other than a time for reading the image information recorded on the recording medium. GPS satellite orbit information is recorded.
According to the above configuration, long-term GPS satellite orbit information can be recorded on the recording medium without hindering reading of image information in execution of direct printing, and processing can be performed without making the user aware of it.

According to a sixth aspect of the present invention, image information is recorded on the inserted recording medium while the photographing position information and the image information are recorded on a portable recording medium by photographing with a camera having a GPS positioning function. A long-term GPS satellite orbit information obtained through a communication network on the recording medium inserted for direct printing on the printing paper. Is a GPS orbit information recording system.
According to the above configuration, the printer device constituting the GPS orbit information recording system records the long-term GPS satellite orbit information acquired through the communication network on the recording medium inserted for direct printing on the printing paper. Without being aware of the acquisition of long-term GPS satellite orbit information, it is possible to acquire long-term GPS satellite orbit information to be used for the next shooting by simply inserting a majority type recording medium for direct printing in the printer device. This improves usability.

According to a seventh aspect of the present invention, there is provided a control program for controlling a printer by a computer, which is a direct program for reading image information photographed by a camera and recorded on a portable recording medium and printing it on a printing paper. The computer is realized with a printing function and a GPS information recording function for recording long-term GPS satellite orbit information acquired through a communication network on the recording medium inserted for direct printing on printing paper.
According to the above configuration, the long-term GPS satellite used at the time of the next shooting can be obtained by simply inserting a portable recording medium for direct printing in the printer device without the user being aware of the acquisition of long-term GPS satellite orbit information. Orbit information can be acquired, improving usability.

Next, preferred embodiments of the present invention will be described with reference to the drawings.
FIG. 1 is a schematic configuration block diagram of a GPS orbit information recording system.
The GPS orbit information recording system 10 includes a digital camera 11 having a memory card read / write function and a GPS positioning function, and a memory card 12 that is inserted into the digital camera 11 or a printer described later, reads and writes data, and stores various data. A printer 13 having a memory card read / write function, a direct print function for reading out and printing image data stored in the inserted memory card 12 when the memory card 12 is inserted, and a long-term GPS satellite orbit A GPS server 15 that distributes data via a communication network 14 such as the Internet, and a plurality of GPS satellites 16-1 to 16-4 that transmit GPS positioning radio waves are provided.
In the above configuration, when the target memory card 12 is inserted, the printer 13 connects to the GPS server 15 via the communication network 14, downloads long-term GPS satellite orbit data, and uses the memory card read / write function to The satellite orbit data acquisition and writing function for writing the long-term GPS satellite orbit data downloaded to is provided.

FIG. 2 is a schematic block diagram of the digital camera.
The digital camera 11 receives GPS positioning radio waves from the GPS satellites 16-1 to 16-4 via the antenna 21 and outputs data (ephemeris data and almanac data) for calculating its own position; In addition to functioning as a finder at the time of shooting, an LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) 23 for displaying various information, a controller 24 for controlling the entire digital camera 11, a memory 25 functioning as a work area, and various operations by the user. The operation input unit 26, a memory card reader / writer 27 in which the memory card 12 is inserted and which reads and writes various data, and a camera unit 28 that actually performs photographing are provided.
Here, the GPS receiver 22 is the ephemeris data that is the position parameter of the GPS satellite 16X (X: 1 to 4) that has received the GPS positioning radio wave via the antenna 21, and the almanac data that includes the position parameters of all the GPS satellites. Among (= long-term GPS satellite orbit data), at least ephemeris data is received and output.

FIG. 3 is a schematic configuration block diagram of the printer.
The printer 13 includes a memory card reader / writer 31 that reads and writes various data, a controller 32 that controls the entire printer, and a print engine that performs various types of printing including direct printing under the control of the controller 32. 33, a communication interface 34 for communicating with an external device including a GPS server via the communication network 14, and an LCD 35 for displaying various types of information including images.

Here, data stored in the memory card 12 will be described.
FIG. 4 is an explanatory diagram of data stored in the memory card.
The memory card 12 roughly includes a long-term GPS satellite orbit data storage unit 41 that stores long-term GPS satellite orbit data (for example, almanac data) of a plurality of GPS satellites, and an image data storage unit 42.
The long-term GPS satellite orbit data storage unit 41 includes an ID storage unit 43 that stores ID data for GPS server connection authentication, and an orbit data storage unit 44 that stores long-term GPS satellite orbit data downloaded from the GPS server 15. ing.
The image data storage unit 42 can store captured images as image data 45-1 to 45-n together with shooting position data.

FIG. 5 is a timing chart of a series of processes in the GPS orbit information recording system.
The GPS server 15 manages other GPS satellite orbit data received from the GPS satellites 16-1 to 16-4 or GPS orbit data for the GPS satellites 16-1 to 16-4 via the communication network 14. GPS satellite information is acquired from (step S11).

The GPS server 15 generates and updates long-term GPS satellite orbit information based on the acquired GPS satellite information (step S12).
On the other hand, in the digital camera 11, when a user inserts a memory card into the memory card reader / writer 27, the controller 24 of the digital camera 11 controls the memory card reader / writer 27 to read the memory card 12, and initialization is performed. If not, initialization is performed, and ID data for GPS server connection authentication registered in advance in the memory 25 and stored in a nonvolatile manner is registered in the memory card 12 (step S31).
If initialization has already been performed and ID data for GPS server connection authentication has been registered, the camera enters a shooting operation waiting state.

  Further, the user prints image data (photo data) recorded in the memory card 12 by the printer 13, that is, reads out the image data photographed by the digital camera 11 and recorded in the memory card 12 and prints it on the printing paper. When the memory card 12 on which the captured image and ID data are already recorded is inserted into the memory card reader / writer 31 of the printer 13 (step S21), the controller 32 of the printer 13 The print engine 33 is controlled to perform direct printing in which image data photographed by the digital camera 11 and recorded on the memory card 12 is read and printed on printing paper (step S25).

In parallel with this direct printing process, the controller 32 reads the ID data for GPS server connection authentication from the ID storage unit 43 of the memory card 12 and connects to the GPS server 15 via the communication interface 34 and the communication network 14. The GPS server connection authentication ID data is transmitted to make a long-term GPS satellite orbit information request (step S22).
Thereby, the GPS server 15 refers to the transmitted ID data, and when ID authentication is performed, the long-term GPS orbit data as the long-term GPS satellite orbit information generated and updated in step S12 is transmitted via the communication network 14 to the printer. 13 (step S14).
On the other hand, the controller 32 of the printer 13 receives long-term GPS satellite orbit data from the GPS server 15 via the communication interface 34 (step S23), and controls the memory card reader / writer 27 to control the memory card 12 inserted. The long-term GPS satellite orbit data storage unit 41 is accessed, and the received long-term GPS satellite orbit data is recorded in the orbit data storage unit 44 (step S24).

  At this time, in the orbit data storage unit 44, in order to temporally manage the recorded long-term GPS satellite orbit data, time information such as reception time information or writing time information is recorded together with the long-term GPS satellite orbit data. This is because the long-term GPS satellite orbit data is updated every day, and the reliability of the long-term GPS satellite orbit data is ensured to some extent from one week to ten days after generation (or reception). If it exceeds that, the reliability of the data, and hence the positioning accuracy, will decrease. If the time has passed to the extent that the reliability is considered to be low, the recorded long-term GPS satellite orbit data is used for the positioning calculation. This is to prevent it from happening.

As described above, the processes in steps S22 to S24 are performed as a background process of the direct print process. Therefore, the user performs a process of writing long-term GPS satellite orbit data into the memory card 12. Realized without awareness.
In this case, the memory card 12 is mechanically locked to prevent the memory card 12 from being extracted from the memory card reader / writer 31 before the long-term GPS satellite orbit data is written to the memory card 12. Can be prevented from being extracted, or display can be performed on the LCD 35 so as not to be extracted.

Then, after completion of the process of writing the long-term GPS satellite orbit data to the memory card 12, the user removes the memory card from the memory card reader / writer 31 and inserts it again into the memory card reader / writer 27 of the digital camera 11 (step S32). When the power is turned on, the digital camera 11 shifts to a photographing process (step S33).
Next, the use of long-term GPS satellite orbit data in the photographing process of the digital camera 11 will be described.

FIG. 6 is a processing flowchart of photographing processing of the digital camera.
When the memory card 12 is inserted into the memory card reader / writer 27 of the digital camera 11 (step S41) and the power is turned on, the controller 24 determines in the operation input unit 26 whether or not a shooting operation has been performed (step S41). S42).
If it is determined in step S42 that no photographing operation has been performed (step S42; No), the controller 24 enters a standby state.

If it is determined in step S42 that a photographing operation has been performed (step S42; Yes), the controller 24 controls the memory card reader / writer 27 to store the long-term GPS satellite orbit data storage unit of the inserted memory card 12. It is determined whether or not long-term GPS satellite orbit data is stored with reference to the orbit data storage unit 41 (step S44).
In the determination of step S44, when the long-term GPS satellite orbit data is stored with reference to the orbit data storage unit 44 (step S44; Yes), the controller 24 refers to the long-term GPS satellite orbit data and A receivable GPS satellite is specified, and a GPS positioning radio wave is received by the GPS receiver 22 via the antenna 21, and at least ephemeris data is output (step S45). If the radio wave condition is good and the almanac data can be received, the latest data can be used. Therefore, the GPS receiver 22 may be used to output both data.

Next, the controller 24 performs the positioning calculation of the self-position based on the input ephemeris data and the long-term GPS orbit data (= corresponding to almanac data) recorded in the memory card 12 (step S46), and the process goes to step S47. Transition.
In the determination of step S44, the orbit data storage unit 44 is referred to, and if the long-term GPS satellite orbit data is not stored (step S44; No), the controller 24 sends a GPS signal to the GPS receiver 22 via the antenna 21. Control is performed to receive positioning radio waves and output ephemeris data and almanac data as GPS positioning data (step S45).
Next, the controller 24 performs positioning calculation of the self position based on the input ephemeris data and almanac data (step S46), and the process proceeds to step S47.
Subsequently, the controller 24 determines whether or not the self-position has been measured (step S47).

If it is determined in step S47 that the self-position has been measured (step S47; Yes), the controller 24 captures the image acquired by the photographing operation in step S42 together with the photographing position data that is the positioning result of the self-position. The data is stored and the process is terminated (step S48). In this case, the shooting position data is stored in the image data in a format compliant with, for example, Exif (Exchangeable Image File Format).
If it is determined in step S47 that the self-position has been measured (step S47; Yes), the controller 24 captures the image acquired by the photographing operation in step S42 together with the photographing position data that is the positioning result of the self-position. The data is stored and the process is terminated (step S48).
If it is determined in step S47 that the self position cannot be determined (step S47; No), the controller 24 stores the image acquired by the photographing operation in step S42 as image data, and ends the process (step S47). S51).

  As described above, according to the present embodiment, the user can directly print long-term GPS satellite orbit data by simply printing the image data recorded on the memory card with the printer 13 (or attempting to print directly). It can be automatically acquired from the GPS server 15 and can acquire the shooting position in a short time by using long-term GPS satellite orbit data even in a place where the radio wave condition is bad at the next shooting, for example, indoors, and shooting more reliably. The position can be recorded.

  In the above description, the case of a memory card as a portable recording medium has been described. However, the present invention is applicable if the recording medium is a rewritable recording medium and both the digital camera 11 and the printer 13 are compatible. For example, a USB memory, an optical disk, etc. can be considered.

  In the above description, the digital camera having a single function has been described. However, the present invention can be similarly applied to a PDA (Personal Digital Assistance) having a camera, a PND (Portable Navigation Device), and the like.

It is a general | schematic block diagram of a GPS orbit information recording system. It is a block diagram of a schematic configuration of a digital camera. FIG. 2 is a schematic configuration block diagram of a printer. It is explanatory drawing of the storage data of a memory card. It is a timing chart of a series of processes in a GPS orbit information recording system. It is a process flowchart of the imaging | photography process of a digital camera.

Explanation of symbols

DESCRIPTION OF SYMBOLS 10 GPS orbit information recording system 11 Digital camera 12 Memory card 13 Printer 14 Communication network 15 GPS server 16-1 to 16-4, 16X GPS satellite 21 Antenna 22 GPS receiver 24, 32 Controller (Direct printing part, GPS information recording part )
25 Memory 26 Operation input unit 27, 31 Memory card reader / writer (direct printing unit, GPS information recording unit)
28 Camera Unit 33 Print Engine (Direct Printing Unit)
34 Communication interface 41 Long-term GPS satellite orbit data storage unit 42 Image data storage unit 43 ID storage unit 44 Orbit data storage unit 45-1 to 45-n Image data

Claims (6)

A direct printing unit that reads out image information captured by a camera and recorded on a portable recording medium and prints it on printing paper;
A GPS information recording unit for recording long-term GPS satellite orbit information acquired through a communication network on the recording medium inserted for direct printing on printing paper ;
The GPS information recording unit requests and acquires the long-term GPS satellite orbit information when the recording medium is inserted . The long-term GPS satellite orbit information is
2. The shooting position information obtained by referring to long-term GPS satellite orbit information by the GPS positioning function and used for the next shooting by a camera having a GPS positioning function is recorded on the recording medium together with image information. The printer device described in 1. The long-term GPS satellite orbit information is
The printer device according to claim 1, wherein the printer device is acquired from a GPS server through the communication network. The GPS information recording unit
Wherein the recording predetermined time other than the time of reading the recorded image information on the medium, the printer according to any one of claims 1 to 3, characterized in that for recording the acquired long GPS satellite orbit information on the recording medium apparatus. Shooting with a camera having a GPS positioning function, recording shooting position information and image information on a portable recording medium,
Comprising a printer device having a direct printing function for reading out image information recorded on the inserted recording medium and printing it on printing paper;
The printer apparatus, when the recording medium is inserted to direct printing on printing paper, requests and obtains the long-term GPS satellite orbit information through a communications network, the obtained long-term GPS satellite orbit information on the recording medium A GPS orbit information recording system for recording. A control program for controlling a printer by a computer,
A direct printing function that reads out image information captured by a camera and recorded on a portable recording medium and prints it on printing paper;
GPS information recording function for recording long-term GPS satellite orbit information acquired through a communication network on the recording medium inserted for direct printing on printing paper;
A function of requesting and acquiring the long-term GPS satellite orbit information when the recording medium is inserted;
Is realized by the computer.

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