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• New Chassis for project

  visualkev • 08/24/2014 at 20:09 • 0 comments

  I was a bit too optimistic about fitting the project in the case I first tried. This old hard drive harddrive carrier  is significantly larger, and is metal, originally on 5 sides. I will need to fashion the top side piece and optical window side piece myself.

• Packaging

  visualkev • 08/21/2014 at 02:53 • 0 comments

  I'm finally ready to put this project is a chassis of some sort. I found an unused DSL modem that might hold the project. If it does at all, it will be a tight fit.

  All the above needs to fit in the case below:

  Any questions?

• USB shutdowns

  visualkev • 08/09/2014 at 14:52 • 0 comments

  I have been experiencing usb shutdowns recently. I first thought it was a complete system lock up, but I discovered that the OS and my scripts are still active. Without USB there is no network or keyboard, aka not very usable. The system does give a 'Disabling irq 32' when it goes offline. The pi forums indicate that usb is over amp'd, so I connected a powered usb hub to it for testing.

  On a forward note, I built the external circuit on perf-board and it seems to be working well. I did drop the low battery cutoff functionality for this version as I will probably rework the power supply again.

• Low battery detector misfires

  visualkev • 08/06/2014 at 05:10 • 0 comments

  I think the low battery detector misfires when the camera and the flashlight turn on causing the power supply to dip, but it doesn't happen every time. My multi-meter isn't fast enough to register such a short blip. I need to figure out a fix based on that hypothesis, probably a capacitor across the power supply to  flatten out the dip a bit

• Back on track!

  visualkev • 07/19/2014 at 21:33 • 0 comments

  The wifi stability seems to have been restored with the new wifi dongle.  I've reattached all the external circuits to the PI and all seems well. No other hardware changes have happened since the wifi flakyness popped up. On the software side, I've been cleaning up the scripts and organizing them and making the script names more accurate to their current purpose as the scripts have morphed a fair amount since I started thid project. I'm also working out a start-up script so the monitor starts with the init system on start-up. I need to test the low battery detector and shutdown script. 

• New Wifi dongle on its way

  visualkev • 07/17/2014 at 03:12 • 0 comments

  Not much to report except that I could not overcome the packet loss, so I've ordered a Kootek wifi dongle, http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FWMEFES/ref=pe_385040_30332190_TE_dp_1,  which will be here this week. Once i get stable network again, then i can get back on track.

• Wifi issues

  visualkev • 07/11/2014 at 03:01 • 0 comments

  With recent long run tests, the Pi has been going offline. Ping tests over wifi are averaging 5% packet loss. It could be environmental, or possibly hardware. I will test environment first, moving the device to another room. If the dongle supports 5GHz, I will give that a try as well. The USB dongle was dirt cheap, so i could get a gross of them, if they last a year or so as my current one has.

• LED driver updated and other stuff

  visualkev • 07/06/2014 at 14:47 • 0 comments

  I had to do away with the opto-isolator because i needed current gain to drive the high intensity IR LED, so I'm now using an NPN transistor, pn2222. 

  In other news, I added a circuit to detect the low battery signal from the boost converter board. I will use that signal to halt the OS. I'm going to try the event interrupt method of the python module in the pir-detect script, since i will have 2 inputs to monitor now, low battery and PIR sensor. 

  I've also started organizing the code in the github repo into server and client; the Pi being the client and the server being the target of the uploads. The server also runs the scripts that add the time stamp overlays and stitches the frames together into avi movies.  I initially tried to add the overlays on the Pi, but it couldn't process each image fast enough to keep up with the image per second stream from the camera.

• Everything running on single power source!

  visualkev • 07/04/2014 at 16:12 • 0 comments

  I received my 5v boost converter, 3.7v lipo cell and charger, got it all hooked up and mostly working. The IR flashlight needs more tweaking to work on 3.7v

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