Hi Jesse,
I am building a camera network across Australia and New Zealand for monitoring the Aurora Australis for the Southern Hemisphere Aurora Group on Facebook.
You can see the current images (built using Raspberry Pi’s and RPi cameras) here, if you’re interested: https://ionthesky.huntergeophysics.com/test.php
I’m now looking at switching to the Theta as it provides a 360-degree view (useful for monitoring cloud cover, which obviously blocks the view of aurora), and because it is capable of long-exposure photographs at high ISO (vital for imaging very weak aurora.
I need to use USB over WiFi because the Raspberry Pi’s cannot connect to both the local WiFi network (to upload the images to my server) and connect to the Theta simultaneously (even when you have two separate USB WiFi adapters). The RPi 3 and RPiZ Wireless do have Bluetooth, but the RPi BT module can only connect to certain devices (e.g. headphones); it cannot be used for connecting to generic BT devices such as COM ports or the Theta camera. So USB was the only way to go.
By the way, we had a very strong aurora here last night - managed to get some really fantastic images with the Theta V I’m prototyping with…