If you’re an avid traveller, you probably have albums upon albums of pictures to share, and you’ve also probably bored your friends and family with endless slideshows.

That can be changed with the Globe Trotter, an Arduino project that acts as a “globe shaped picture browser”.

What you’ll find here is a simple globe of the Earth to which pins were inserted for specific countries that have been visited. These pins were connected to capacitive sensors connected to an Arduino. Touching the pins brings up an album for that country, and then the pictures inside can be scrolled through by turning the globe thanks to a rotary encoder connected to the axis.

We really love this project. It’s a simple system of two types of inputs being interrupted as keyboard strokes on a PC, but it’s more than the sum of its parts.

Some of the maker projects we feature are simple playthings or cool experiments, but this is one idea that we believe could easily be a production product that would be snapped up in stores.

You can read more about how this project was made on the Arduino Project Hub. We also suggest this short descrpitive video created when the Globe Trotter was a work in progress.