Home automation and / or improvement projects
You can’t do much better for still image compression than JPEG. Video codecs use the high redundancy of images in time to get better compression when compressing a series of images.
I wanted to archive images from my home security cameras (which save still JPEGs over FTP to a Raspberry Pi) and save some disk space so I whipped up a script to pull them down and transcode them to video.
Any ROS based system needs ROSCore running to provide the basic OS services. My home automation building operating system is no different and for an always on, building operating system, you really want everything to run as a daemon. However, my only always on wired ethernet server is a Mac Mini, not an Ubuntu server so I figured out how to get ROSCore to run as a daemon on OSX. Continue reading ROSCore as Daemon on OSX
The Raspberry Pi has IO pins left over after attaching it to the OpenSprinkler Pi and I am still waiting for my Pinoccio‘s to instrument my environment so I added a first yard sensor to the pi. It’s a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor. Fortunately, pretty much all the work to get this connected to the Raspberry Pi has already been done. Consulting the pinout and using Adafruit’s interface program, I got my first data in minutes of work :-) Continue reading Garden Automation Part 2
Because I always want to automate everything, and I am not that good at gardening yet, I am working on adding smarts to our garden. To start with, the watering system.
I bought an OpenSprinkler PI from Ray’s Hobby and a Raspberry Pi model A (the one with less RAM and since I knew I was going to want to operate it on wifi and wasn’t going to be asking too much of it. I figured I ought to get some hands on experience with the Raspi since everyone is talking about it and it’s convenient not to have to start from scratch for sprinkler automation. Continue reading Garden Automation Part 1
I have had an NFC capable phone for a year now and just decided to start playing with the technology. My first simple hack is NFC tagging my notebook.
Continue reading NFC notebook
I finally got around to setting up the plumbing to save all the motion activated snapshots from my security camera to my server and once a day encode the individual JPGs in to a Theora video.