Mognet

22 minutes ago, jiberjaber said:

Is there an easy guide to upgrading from the GIT without having to reenter long/lat etc?

Hi Jason,

Yes there is. There's a bit about updating here https://github.com/MarkGrimwood/Mognet-All-Sky-Camera-install/wiki#updating First bit is just the plain update, second bit is just to update GPS coordinates

And by coincidence, I made some bug fixes today too. Just minor stuff this time

With some help from Bob (jmrp) on GitHub who discovered the right settings, the code has been changed so that it can capture images every minute at night too. Only problem is that not all cameras can do it. It works with my Pi V2.1 NoIR camera modules and should do with the Pi HQ camera too, but it doesn't and does work with the WaveShare camera module. The solution lay in using --exposure off instead of --exposure night in the nighttime capture. There is a note in the raspistill documentation to say that whether it works or not depends on camera tuning

A few little defects fixed and tested, and I've added a version history too. I've called it version 1.2 as I hadn't really recorded the updates before

• Fix history creation where an unused period containing only the initial files was being archived in the history section
• Fix minor defect in autodeploy and update that would display an error if enter was pressed with a blank entry instead of a response
• Change autodeploy to only copy the necessary files
• Change autodeploy so that the gps file is created in the execution directory
• Change update to copy LICENSE and README.md too
• Add a link back to the GitHub page and a this version history
• Tidy up on sun times page

And I'll put Hardware Watchdog on all mine soon as a router reboot ten minutes ago has just caused one of them to lose connection 😠

Focus looks pretty good there. I know with mine I ended up settling for a close enough focus set in daytime

The Pi Zero in my conservatory had a CPU temp of 25 at the time your image was taken, and the spare room one recorded 29 degrees. Looks like the Zeroes run cooler than the other models, so that might account for the change in condensation

Thanks. It's looking good there, and it makes me happy to see someone getting good use out of it

I did mean to link back to the GitHub page from the About page, so I'll do that when I do that little fix tomorrow

If you want to capture MQTT data to add onto the image then look in capture.sh and newmovie.sh in back-end/pics/ as that's where the images are captured

3 hours ago, jiberjaber said:

Seems to be going well so far, though I have noticed that whilst I have an entry for last night and yesterday, the night archive is just one image, but the latest night is the actual full set of files/video. Perhaps the creation of the archive needs to move to when the start of the next night collection starts? 

That's a known issue and does get mentioned in the wiki section. The cause comes from creating both day and night directories at the same time. When the changeover code in newmovie.sh is run it just assumes there was something in the directory to archive rather than checking. Along with checking the directory existance I should also check the count of files, and then only create the archive if there are more than four (the newly created directory contains image, thumbnail, mpeg and info files). I'll fix and test that tomorrow

3 hours ago, jiberjaber said:

Also, I had a router issue today which resulted in the house network being effected and I had to power cycle the all-sky to get it back on - not associated with your code of course, but a common issue we all might encounter especially if the camera is up high or bottom of the garden etc...

I've had similar happen with a router update and I've had to power cycle the Pi to reconnect, but I've also seen it reconnect fine too. Something to look into so I can add fix notes to the wiki. One of mine I set to a fixed IP address on the router, and I think I set the other to a fixed IP address on the Pi. The former is probably the better solution

I'll have a look at that hardware watchdog. It could be interesting. I was planning to keep mine within easy reach but I know other people will have different plans

That's good news. Odd about the connection problem, but these things happen.  Let me know if you find anything wrong other than the little bits I've documented already

All we need to do now is fix the weather!

I suspect it's March winds and April showers making up for being late this year 🤣

10 minutes ago, JamesF said:

If it's anything like here over on your side of the country, the camera could be in Germany by now...

James

Quite possibly. Tonight it's 22mph, tomorrow gusting 50 according to the BBC forecast

If it's been working fine, then try the cron job removal and remote reboot first. And if that doesn't fix it then get the ladder out. But not tonight or tomorrow as it's a bit windy right now!

That's odd. SSH onto it and type in

vcgencmd get_camera

That should tell you if the camera is detected and enabled. Both values will return as 1 if they are

It could also just be a clash between the old and new ones. I'd intended for a clean install, so maybe first stop and remove the existing cron job, and then force a reboot

sudo service cron stop
sudo crontab -r
sudo reboot -f -f

After that it should have sorted any tangles that it got itself into

Edit: Also spotted a couple of hours ago that I'd left a test value in the code. Instead of regenerating times at noon it was set to 13:35. I've fixed it now, and if you pulled the code after 9:15 you should have the correct version (or check in mgasc.sh and see if the line that sets dailyupdate.sh to run says 0 12 or 35 13. It should be 0 12)

1 hour ago, jiberjaber said:

Right - thanks for this, I think I know what I'll be tinkering with when the rain stops this week!

Let me know how you get on. I think I've caught all the major bugs and it runs nicely here on both Pi Zeros, and it should be easy to install now

1 minute ago, happy-kat said:

I've seen that the IR filter can be removed from the old xbox webcams and that is makes it more sensitive., another thought for the rainy day sometime list

That's a good idea. I should also check into the modern webcams too as the only one I've got here that still works is an ancient HP one. I think it's about ten years old

Have been tinkering with it some more and making a few minor updates. Most important though is adding the wiki page to document everything I can think of https://github.com/MarkGrimwood/Mognet-All-Sky-Camera-install/wiki

Checked into webcam usage as well, and it looks doable. It uses the fswebcam command instead of raspistill, so I'll have to work out something in code to test for them. But most importantly test that a webcam can capture adequate night views too

I don't know if mine will work with the ASI cameras as I don't have one yet. If not, then Thomas Jaquin's code probably will https://github.com/thomasjacquin/allsky His code looks like it's more suited to the better cameras and higher end devices, and is configurable for different options. Mine is more entry level.

And that reminds me that I should really test it out with a webcam too as I don't know if they use the same instructions as the Pi cameras

Lots of updates done, and a couple of little bug fixes. It should install much easier now. Tomorrow I'm working on the wiki for it so I can detail how it works, with screenshots and explanations of what each script does

Thanks to Bob (jmrp on here?) for giving it a trial run, and notifying me of problems as he run into them

PLA is a bioplastic, and can apparently be recycled or composted. There is nothing specific on the Essex County Council website about it or Type 7 plastics in general so might have to ask. I expect that the current volume for recycling is comparatively quite low so there may be nothing officially in place yet

Wikipedia has some more about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polylactic_acid

18 minutes ago, JamesF said:

I tried the snap install, but not the app image.  I discovered though that an earlier release is available as a .deb, so I tried that and it seems to work fine.  On windows it tells me that v4.9 is available, which isn't the case for Linux, so perhaps if I wait for that the problem will go away anyhow.

There's an AppImage of 4.9. Not seen the snap images or deb files for a while. Do you know what version it is that's crashing? There were problems with the 3.x versions (I think) where they would crash on startup or cause a BSOD

55 minutes ago, JamesF said:

Looks like Creality use the Ultimaker slicer, and as it happens there's a copy of the Ultimaker slicer available for Linux which means I could do away with an old Windows laptop that I currently use for slicing.  So I downloaded and installed it.  And it crashed as soon as I tried to open a file :(

James

The Creality slicer is a front end onto Cura Engine, but it's usually easier to use Cura, and it gives a lot more options. I've not had any problems running the AppImage of the latest versions in Linux Mint. Good news is that the Windows executable version can be run under Wine if you want to go that route

I found the instructions for my CR10s a bit lacking too. A quick Google gave me a YouTube video on build and setup. There has been a good community built up around the Creality printers so advice is never hard to find

11 hours ago, JamesF said:

I've not determined if the "disable stepper" menu option means I can move the motors freely by hand  yet

Disable steppers does mean exactly that. When they are off they are all freely movable by hand. Although it's probably better to use the controls to move the gantry up and down because of the lead screws and disturbing their alignment

@jiberjaber Hi Jason. I've uploaded my version onto GitHub, and because there are so many changes I've started a separate thread for it

Last year I picked up Pete's all sky camera code so I could build my own. I spotted a few things in the code that needed fixing or improving. As my tinkering ended up with rewriting most of it I thought it deserved its own thread

Lots of changes have been made from Pete's version

• A history of images and videos is now available. And automatically removes the oldest when space gets tight
• A timestamp has been added to each stored image and is in the video too. CPU temperature as well. Air temperature will follow soon
• The crontab generation has been rewritten so that new movie setups don't clash with image captures and consecutive days or nights don't get joined together
• Crontab regeneration has been moved to noon
• Testing for the absence of an already running instance of the capture script before starting a new capture
• Speed improvements in video creation. Each image is now added immediately after capture
• Install simplified by creating an installer script
• Display improvements by using CSS
• Common PHP code moved to another file for including
• A few little bug fixes
• Images and video are now captured at 1080p, even on a Pi Zero

It now runs happily on a Pi Zero, which is probably the minimum possible spec. Downloading the videos can be a bit slow at times, especially at night. There are still things to fix or add, and these will happen in due course

The code is available on my GitHub site, along with all the instructions, etc https://github.com/MarkGrimwood/Mognet-All-Sky-Camera-install

Everything going at once sounds like a motherboard or control board issue. They should be fairly easy to replace

11 minutes ago, jiberjaber said:

How are you getting along with your new version? 

 

I'm itching to give it a try - the current one is OK but suffering from a few gremlins that I am reluctant to investigate and fix

 

 

I've been tinkering and letting it run to show any gremlins. Have caught a few that might not have shown from standard testing. And found that memory card speed and quality is important! Three rebuilds have happened thanks to rubbish cards

I've got image and video history working nicely. Videos are now smooth, and on a Pi Zero it will successfully capture once per minute daytime and once every two minutes nighttime. I've also taken some stuff from the W3Schools tutorials to handle the differences between PC and mobile displays, and modified some of the image displays. There are other plenty of other changes too. I'll document them and the gotchas when I upload it. That will probably be tomorrow as I just need to finish adjusting the user/owner of the web pages and images in /var/www/html/. I'm changing them from root to nobody.

And I've written an autodeployer! It does almost everything for the setup Have to say that working with Bash is..umm...interesting 🤣

Certainly a more impressive landing than SpaceX