Upstagram Is A Flying Raspberry Pi That Publishes Live Pictures On Instagram

What do Instagram, the Raspberry Pi and the movie “Up” have in common? When you mash all these things together, you get Upstagram, a neat hack that the Hackerloop team just unveiled.

First, the team made a replica of the house in “Up” using paper and foam. It was just big enough to fit a Raspberry Pi and its camera, a battery and a 3G hotspot. The Raspberry Pi, an open source and very cheap mini-computer to tweak, experiment and try new things with, is a hacker’s dream.

Then, the team used about 90 helium balloons to make the house fly above Paris’ landscape. While Instagram is only available on iOS and Android, they reverse-engineered the posting process to transform the Raspberry Pi into an Instagram-taking machine. And here’s the result:

Flying 300 feet (90 meters) above the ground, the little house took more than 400 photos and posted them automatically to an Instagram account. The team kept the 15 best shots and shared them on Hackerloop’s account.

“It’s not about hacking Instagram, it’s about using it to build something that we were convinced would be awesome,” Hackerloop co-founder Valentin Squirelo wrote. “Creativity is also about pushing existing tools further, in a way they weren’t initially designed for.”

As reverse-engineering the Instagram uploading process certainly breaks the terms of service, the team expects that its Instagram account will soon be shut down. But for now, this hack certainly looks cool.

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