Mognet

I've had an oddity occur with a Pi Noir webcam (this one) I got it last week and it's all been working fine, then a couple of nights ago it developed a white bloom across the image at night. It survived tinkering with the capture setting, numerous reboots, several power downs, and cable checks. And a case redesign to make sure it wasn't stray light from the Pi Zero inside. It has even made it onto the videos. Then in right clicking and viewing the image prior to posting here, it 'fixed' itself.

Can't see a reason for it in the code either

I wasn't paying attention to the time so I missed it. Will it be available somewhere to watch again?

4 hours ago, Rodd said:

Makes sense.....all the hornets are sleeping peacefully though, not sure I want to kick the nest.

I don't think you need to. They are pretty amazing images as they are

I know that ramp too, but usually from walking by it. I'm across the river in Woodham

Hi,

That sounds like a good idea for the aurora. Having seen them in Iceland I know you have to be in the right place to see them

In answer to your questions, and from what I know:

• I think there are a few mistakes in the instructions. I didn't need to use the make file when I set mine up, and I think there is a comment by someone else in the thread about that. The best instructions are here in the GIthub code. They don't display properly on the main page for the project but in that text file they do
• You can have as many Pi's as you want sending images to display on a common web page. There is nothing in the code here for that, but it doesn't mean that you can't extend the code to do what you need.
• There is currently no security on the web pages, but they are currently only accessible from within the local network and are not exposed to the wider internet. That part would depend on network configuration. There have also been a couple of other security questions raised that might need fixing
• The speed of the night images is a limitation of the camera. It needs to collect more photons at night to have anything for display. Mine is set to take images once every two minutes and that seems to work ok. I have not yet checked what the actual exposure time at night is to see what is possible

It's a good documentary. I watched it a couple of times a few years ago.

Just put it on again as it's worth repeating

6 hours ago, jiberjaber said:

I can't quite remember now but I think the approach I took was to only have to change the code in a single location... but it's been a while since I looked at it   

I can't fit the sunrise on mine as I have outdoor temp and wind speed/direction on it but I can certainly see the appeal for anyone who doesn't have weather station data.

You took the all in one place at the start approach. On reflection that's probably the cleaner method of fixing the problem. I'd still use the fgets which then wouldn't need to be wrapped in a substr as it's a bit more obvious where the data comes from

I don't have any weather station data or even a temperature probe, so I just went with the sunrise instead. I didn't look to see if it was possible to split lines to get anything more on

I need to order a dome of some kind so I can mount it outside. Surprised that in all the junk in this house I don't have anything that appears to be suitable!

Poking around the code and finding fixes for stuff is making me miss being a developer. I did have a huge coding aspect to my role some years ago but that part seems to have gone away

I took a different approach and replaced the fread usage with a series of fgets. Might be my history of processing sequential files on a mainframe showing though!

An example from webcam.php. Similar code changes are required in suntimes.php, index.php and about.php. Index.html also contains the fread code, but it looks like the php section in there isn't used, so I've commented that out

// Get the sunset time from the daily file
$myfile = fopen("/home/allsky/daily", "r") or die("Unable to open file!");

$ADawn=substr(fgets($myfile),0,5);
$NDawn=substr(fgets($myfile),0,5);
$CDawn=substr(fgets($myfile),0,5);
$SRise=substr(fgets($myfile),0,5);
$SSet=substr(fgets($myfile),0,5);
$CSet=substr(fgets($myfile),0,5);
$NSet=substr(fgets($myfile),0,5);
$ASet=substr(fgets($myfile),0,5);
$sunrise ='Sunrise: '. $SRise;
$sunset = 'Sunset: '. $SSet;
fclose($myfile);

I've added the sunrise time into the banner text too

The odd thing with the last hour of night images didn't reoccur last night, so I'm not sure what happened there. Could be a timing thing again

I suspect at least one problem could be down to the file /home/allsky/daily having the text (midnight sun) in it. That's the cause of the sunset time in the image displaying something like 01VT04 instead of the proper sunset time

The daytime movie problem I think was purely down to timing and the change over being on the hour. I notice that when it resolved itself was when the daytime video was due to start at 04:02. And that means it's likely to happen again whenever the start is on the hour

Having the image time on the video could be useful if anything interesting is caught. Last night I got a bit of an ISS pass in the frame

Has anyone seen an issue where no images are taken for the last hour of night but the last taken image is still being added to the night video? I have a number of duplicated night images from 3am to 4am. It's the second night it's happened that I know of. Saturday night/sunday morning the image didn't change after 3am but was working again in the morning

I'm going to have a couple of debugging sessions. The day video not clearing and the sunset time display issue are on my list already. I know the basic causes, just need to identify fixes now

Definitely a slippery slope! But £80 for an Ender 3 Pro is a bargain. That's about a third of their current retail price

I used mine to print out my own design case this week. It's going in the window for now until I have somewhere to mount it outdoors

That's the usual length for my night videos at the moment, and daytime it's 1min22 ish. Not checked if they are the correct lengths for my capture settings. I've set it to 1 minute for daytime and 2 minutes for nighttime, and then set the video compile to once every fifteen minutes

We're pretty close geographically, and I suspect we all have very similar sunrise and sunset times. I think Jason is only ten miles or so from me so ours will be almost identical

I've put mine up in the spare room window as I don't have all the parts for outdoor placement yet, and my 3D printer is being awkward about printing things at the moment

More oddness. After the reboot things seemed to be better but now have yesterdays daytime video as the night video. I'm sure I checked the night video after a couple of hours too.

Time to refresh the code and investigate. Might be something I've done by accident while looking at the code

I did a remote reboot last night and that cured it. Well, probably cured it. The daytime video wasn't available afterwards and when I checked this morning it was only images from today, so it looks like it cleared out the offending files and sorted itself out. We'll see tomorrow if the problem comes back.

I now have several days worth concatenated, but curiously not the night ones. The code is all there to remove the old videos but it doesn't seem to do anything at the moment. Haven't checked the cron job itself yet. Could be a timing issue where it's deleting the day mp4 just after concatenating it into the updated one

I saw a report on non-planar printing a little while ago. Looks interesting. Seems to only available via a Slic3r plugin at the moment

Aha. Now I see the difference. One was wrapped around a hot cup to make it warp

Were they printed on the same printer or on different printers? My next thought is that one printer has less detailed stepping

On the sloping parts it looks like they were sliced with two different layer heights. Having never printed with anything other than a 0.4mm nozzle I can't think of any other reason for the differences

Fascinating video, especially the effects of it in space. It's not something I'd heard of before and even as an occaisonal juggler I'd not really take much notice of when throwing anything of that fits that set of rules. Tried it tonight with the nearest equivalent, an electric fly swat, and it seems almost impossible to throw so that it rotates just around that axis

I hadn't tinkered with mine, just been in to look at a few things. I'm assuming it's sunwait too.

It's been running constantly for a week without problem, so I'll see how it behaves tomorrow

Had a little oddity happen overnight. The daytime images from yesterday didn't get deleted so the daytime video covers both days. First time I've seen that happen, so must just be a little timing issue

Instead of using sudo before every command, type sudo su at the command prompt. That will give you root (super user) access for everything until you type exit, at which point you'll be return to normal user status