Imagine being at a live gig of your favourite band, wanting to take a picture but you’re miles away from the stage.

Exploring various applications for microcontrollers such as Arduinos and Raspberry Pis and using them as remote social triggers through social APIs (X and Facebook), we built LiveSnap as a proof of concept to trial at a number of live gigs in South Africa.

Users would follow LiveSnap on X, and send a Tweet with the event hashtag at the moment they want to take a picture. The X API would relay the trigger to the Arduino which is connected to a DSLR camera mounted in front of the stage, snap a picture and DM it back to the user with a download link on X.

The feedback was amazing and at the time we explored developing it as a standalone app for live music gigs. Watch this space.