Tag: Raspberry Pi

Gertboard is here! | Raspberry Pi

Manuel Marques October 16, 2012 No Comments Uncategorized , , ,

Gertboard is here! | Raspberry Pi.

Already on my wishlist! Added to the fact that it comes in a kit (got to go fetch the old soldering iron and brush up my fairly limited soldering skills!), it is a very interesting piece of hardware to extend the Pi’s functionality and play even more with it.

There are already a number of Python libraries meant to control the Pi’s GPIO pins, enabling it to interact with the outside world (eg, it could be interesting in a home automation project!…).

Sometimes I’d like to have more time for this kind of activities, sadly it is something that can only be done while on vacations, which are getting shorter every year!… šŸ™

Raspberry Pi as a low-cost IP camera

Manuel Marques October 6, 2012 No Comments Uncategorized , , , , ,

Well, it seems there is no end for the amount of things one can do with the Raspberry Pi… this time my intention was to turn it into an inexpensive IP camera with a cheap webcam I have lying around.

After fiddling around with the stream server components of ffmpeg (with whom I had no luck whatsoever), and giving ZoneMinder a try (a good software for a full CCTV set-up, but a bit overkill for what I intended – plus, I had no luck either with this one), I settled for a simpler configuration using motion and some ffmpeg components.

I updated the installation I had on the SD card with the latest Raspbian image (they recently announced in their blog overclock support for the Pi using this latest image, plus the video4linux compiled binaries are already present, saving me the hassle of compiling them for ARM). After that, it was pretty easy to set up everything, since motion is present in the standard Debian repository.

Right now, I have a cheap USB camera from Lidl connected to the Pi, and outputting 352×288 pixel video at 1-2 fps. The quality isn’t great (probably due to the camera itself), but it does work acceptably! And I was amazed on how easy it actually was to set everything up – the motion package is quite easy to configure, and it allows for very interesting functionality (e.g., motion detection on the image feed, which can trigger various actions).

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