Pete6

Nice mods. I like it. May I please incorporate this into the Github files for distribution? I have set my Pi Zero W to take images at 5 minute intervals at night too. I too would like to incorporate the time into the videos. I am not sure how to do it though. Obviously I have the time of each image but I am not sure how to get that neatly and without jumping into the image or possibly under it whilst still on screen. The other thing I'd like is to display the time in minutes and seconds until the next still image is displayed. I have all the data available in index.html. I even put the text below the image. I have not the faintest idea how to accomplish this.

I found during development that increasing the resolution slowed down night time image processing. That is why I left it at 800x600 and 4 minute interval exposures. Initially I was reluctant to leave maximum resolution as it meant dropping pixels but it kept failing so I left it at 800x600 and it worked. I intend to try using a Pi 4 with higher res but the thing does what I need it to do. I am VERY interested to hear the experiences of others who use the software.

Not sure that is the problem. If a jpg is all one colour then it will be a very small file due to the way the compression algorithm works. I was seeing a number of 100% white images, mainly at changeover from day to night that were causing annoying white flashes in the videos so I took them out. However I have seen some evidence that the Pi Zero W, which has a single core CPU and is somewhat slower than the Pi 3 and 4 may need more time to complete a night image. I have increased the variable " shotN " from 4 to 5 minutes which will give the Pi Zero more time to complete its image. My explanation for this is, with shotN=4 and using htop I see multiple instances of raspistill indicating that it is starting a new image before it has completed the current one. This seems unique to the Pi Zero. If I increase the shotN time to 5 (minutes between shots) then this does not seem to happen. I believe this to be a uniquely Pi Zero problem. During development I obviously wanted the fastest image rate I could get and on my development Pi 3B I found that 4 minutes was the lowest I could reliably get shotN. Pleased leave this with me for a day or so as I wish to test what I have done by just leaving the Pi Zero W running without me fiddling with it. This last has been a feature of development. Just leaving it alone. This is hard for me. I just want it to work. If you wished to edit /home/allsky/webcam and set shotN to 5 then it may fix your problem too. Obviously, it is up to you.

Not sure exactly what is happening but, newnightmovie.sh will only run once automatically when crontab tells it to. In order to stop white flashes getting into the videos I use concat.sh and newday(night)video.sh to reject any incoming webcam-tttt.jpg file that is less than 110Kb in size. If there is no files greater than 110Kb it will never start the video. I am seeing exactly the same thing on my Pi Zero W system but not on the Pi 3 or Pi 4 systems. Currently I have no idea why this should be. I will find out but it may take me a few days as I can only check it at Civil Sunset when it triggers. I only discovered the problem last night. I thought it might have been an anomaly. It did it again on just the Pi Zero W again an hour ago today and now you are also reporting in. I need this fixed as soon as I can.

For me the stumbling block was always the case. When my son replaced one of his old analogue security cameras I got the case. I had already built Thomas Jacquin's Allsky Camera that used a ZWO ASI225MC camera but that was too much money to sink into such a project. Anyway it was my guide camera. This project fell out of that exercise.

Hey, that looks fantastic. It is pretty much about what I get but where I live is very light polluted. Once I can get out of the house (COVID) I shall take mine down to the observatory in darkest South Carolina http://charlotteastronomers.org/ I was aiming to get down to mag 3.5 and from your pic it looks like you are slightly better than that. I see one star Taiyangshou in UMa that is mag 3.65.

That's my favourite part when it switches. Yeah, I programmed but there is a kid like joy in watching it happen. I'm 74 years old and 12 mentally. Not having glass does not matter. I used a 5 quid dummy camera case and it distorted the optics summat rotten. However the images are fine. What you are doing is exactly what I intended although I did not envisage a drinks bottle. However it works great. Getting something like this working for under 20 quid is what it is about. If you do not have a DS18B20 then unless your open up the files and comment out the modules that run the probe they will not work. Thanks Linux. You can however enable the 1-Wire interface in raspi-config and then have a look at my text file to see if raspi-config did actually make the required changes you should be ready to install the temperature probe.

Right, Jason. Let us see if we can make this work. Before that though. I love your pics. They are just great. The temperature probe files your actually need are: webcam.php, index.php and about.php. Of these three webcam.php is the most complicated so we'll leave that till the end. about.php only differs by having the temperature probe section commented out. IF you just take the version from the html section of the Gihub zip file and it should start working IF and ony if the temperature probe is working. This is true for each of the 3 files. In the directory /home/allsky/tools there is a file called DS18B20-test.sh once you set chmod 755 DS18B20-test.sh this file should check that the DS18B20 is working. I am sure you have enabled 1-Wire in raspi-config. If not now would be a good time. index.php is the same as about.php. Just replace the file with the one from the Github zip file. The same rules apply if the DS18B20 ain't working then neither will the file. webcam.php is the same again but with the added complication of the line that displays the temperature in the still image. However so long as (you guessed it) the probe works just replacing the file should work. All the above has actually worked for me a few times. From looking at your pics I think it may be worth downloading the latest version that I uploaded. about.php should diplay V1.09 Get back to me if this does not work as I said. The NOIR camera does not seem to matter. I have had both types and sure the colours are a bit off but you can adjust for that in the webcam file. If you are going to play with the exposure settings it may be worth checking out the raspistill settings page https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/raspbian/applications/camera.md I designed this device to work at night and what I got in the day was a big plus but I didn't spend a lot of time adjusting colour temeratures The wide angle lens does not matter. Obviously the more glass you have to let more photons hit the sensor the better. If it works for you, great. You may be a little confused about my timezone and, at times my spelling. Well, I am a Brit, born in London, living in Charlotte North Carolina. I can tell you live in the UK because of the pic of your guttering and your spelling of colour and your locatoon of Essex - clue there mate. Pete

Jason, Be a little cautious of reducing the times. raspistill takes 1m 40s to complete a night image. This was timed Pi prompt to Pi prompt. I also found, using htop, that a large number of raspistill instances were present (and it fell over) if I reduced the times to much. Honestly I would leave it as I set it until you have had it running for a few days then make changes cautiously and one at a time. I have 4 of them running including one Pi Zero W. They have all run for about 2 weeks without falling over. I like the 3D print. I was going to do that but I got stuck with the transparent part so I re-purposed an old security camera case. Powering the device can be done via the USB port of course but that rather limits the length of cable you can use. If you are handy with a soldering iron then you could put a cheap 12 to 5Volt converter inside the box. This has two benefits. 1. You can feed 12V DC a longer distance 2. There is slightly more heat inside the case to help with dew and condensation removal. Lastly I do not know where you are from but editing /var/www/html/suntimes.php allows you to change the satellite images for those from your geo-location. Eumetsat: https://eumetview.eumetsat.int/static-images/latestImages/ GOES/NOAA: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/satellite.php JMASAT: https://www.data.jma.go.jp/mscweb/data/himawari/index.html Not every image will work however. Some are just the wrong size.

- Yes, I do need to revise the instructions.. I will start that today as I have a clean install to do so I'll write down stuff as I do it. - I guess if it was created by root, it'll be owned by root. For me this was not an issue since I just logged in as root all the time. Is this a problem for you? I would actually like to fix this but it just took so long and other stuff was waiting. - The dots. Well html is a pig. It does not like blank space. I use the approved method of &nbsp; but that did not work so... I used " ....... " and made them black, the same as my background. I suspect that if you edited the file it is possible that you somehow lost the black. html needs <font color="86878a"> infront of the dots and </font> after it. If this fails, please go back to the original downloaded files and try again with that. If that fails, post it here and I will try to fix it for you. - The DS18B20 temperature probe is easy to wire up. Here is a very crude wiring diagram GPIO 3.3V 1 o--+--------- red ------ | nc 2 o \ /4K7 nc 3 o \ / to DS18B20 probe | probe 4 o--+--------- yellow --- Gnd 5 o-------------black ----- You will need to replace some of the html and php files to accomodate the DS18B20. The fikes are the same I just commented out the sections for the DS18B20. Anything else you need, just ask.

@jiberjaber, I think I know why you are seeing errors. I run my AllSky Camera in root. It was easier for me to do this and since the device sits up on the roof and was not used to run any other jobs I figured it would be okay with a strong password. I made some effort not to use root and after three days I failed. Please try running in root and see if this resolves the condition. It should. If you really do not like running in root then I can go back and have a another try at the problem. If you know how to do this then please let me know. Somewhat a non-answer I know but this is what I did. Secondly, regarding your most recent post, please let me know which files you need to find and I'll tell you where they are. In brief, it works like this. - raspistill takes s still image every 2 minutes by day and 4 minutes by night. Each still image is written to /run/shm/webcam.jpg at 800x600 pixels - every 3 minutes, day or night /home/allsy/pics/copypic.sh copies /run/hm/webcam.jpg to /home/allsky/pics/webcam-$(date +'%s').jpg The $(date +'%s') bit writes the date as linux epoch format which is seconds elapsed since 1 January 1970. - every 10 minutes /home/allsky/pics/concatday.sh or concatnight.sh concatonates these still images into a 5 frames a second video that builds over the period. The webcam-ddd.jpg files are copied (not deleted yet) to /home/allsky/pics/day or night directories. They stay there until the next day or night so there is one full day of history. - at day/night changeover (there are two one for the camera day/night and one 3 minutes later for the day/night video) /home/allsky/pics/newdaymovie.sh or newnightmocie.sh runs to make a new period video. Once the new movie is completed newday(night)movie.sh deletes the previous day or night directory content making ready for new still image history files. That's how it works at an image level. /home/allsky/webcam is the key file. It runs everything. webcam's job it to get the day's suntimes via sunwait and then write out a crontab file to /var/spool/cron/crontab/root. This may be viewed by typing crontab -e Not that crontab runs webcam each day at about 3AM to generate a new daily crontab file. I have commented the webcam file fairly well but PLEASE come back and ask question that I may or may not be able to answer. If I have left anything out or if any part of this is unclear to your just ask and I will spill the beans. I want my little project to be accepted 'cuz I think it's good and cheap so I'll help. Pete

Oh wow! I had stopped looking at this thread. I thought it had died. I am so sorry. I have been quietly updating and submitting bug fixes and enhancements to Github as I have found tham. I will give any help I can to anyone who wants it. I am sure that, since I wrote this, I may well have skipped some parts of the instructions. I also need to repeat that I am NOT a programmer. I just wrote stuff and changed it until it did what I wanted. I only just saw these posts. I shall now read them properly and will reply once I have digested their contents. Again, I am sorry I was remiss in monitoring this thread.

You are right. Thank you. I shall wait until the clouds go away and I get a clear night and grab the video. The are about 5.5Mb each. In the mean time you can have a look at the real thing here http://75.10.164.105:8082/ and see the stills, current day and night videos and the rest of my designed for old geezers with phones menu system.

One thing I forgot to mention is that if you omit the DS18B20 temperature probe then this project requires no soldering at all. All you need to make this work is a Raspberry Pi and a Pi Camera V2 and, of course my free software. There is a version of the files needed to run the software without the temperature probe in the GitHub repository. It is only the web pages that use the temperature probe. I have never tried my software on anything earlier than a Raspberry Pi 3B so I cannot vouch functionality on the original Pi or the Pi 2.

It's been done several times before and this is my try at making one. I built Thomas Jacquin's excellent project a couple of years ago and it worked very well. However I found that the temperature inside the dome exceeded the working specifications of the ZWO camera. Since the ASI224MC in question is also my guide camera I had a re-think. I really wanted my own AllSky camera so I made my own. You can see the end result of my efforts here http://75.10.164.105:8082/ Please remember that this is just a Raspberry Pi on the other end of your browser. The code is on GitHub here https://github.com/rederikus/AllSky-Camera-Raspberry-Pi Initially I used a Pi 3B that was just lying on my desk. Later I used a Pi 4B and even later I put in a Pi Zero W. They all worked perfectly once I had made my software work. The Pi Zero W only has WiFI but that does not stop it working. The Pi Camera V2 is really the heart of this system. I started out with a Pi V1 camera and it just did not have the low light performance I wanted. The V2 camera sees down to about magnitude 3.5 from my light polluted back garden. I intend taking it my observatory now it is stable and once I come out of self-isolation. Then I can truly judge what it can see. The Pi Camera V2 uses the Sony IMX219 sensor but the Pi camera version only has a fixed focus lens. Arducam make a replacement sensor body with an M12 interchangeable screw lens. Arducam also sell a variety of lenses so I acquired a 185 degree one and I was set. I put in a cheap buck regulator board so I could feed 12VDC to the case and just derive 5V inside the case allowing a longer cable run My software is just a bunch of bash scripts and html/php files but one file, webcam, is the core and it uses sunwait to obtain the daily sunrise, sunset and twilight times from latitude and longitude coordinates. These times drive the camera and video modes. In use webcam runs itself at about 3AM daily and writes a daily crontab file. In turn this captures a still image every 2 minutes during daytime and 4 minutes at night. Every 3 minutes in copies the current still image to a directory and then every 10 minutes the stills are concatenated into either a day or night video. The images gathered are kept for 24 hours and then erased as a new video is created. I re-purposed a dome security camera case to house the device and I also included a DS18B20 to provide local temperature information. I did think of using a BME280 but I had several DS18B20s in stock. I eventually made two variants. The first used a good quality but expensive security camera case and a Pi 3B inside. That may be viewed here https://photos.app.goo.gl/kCZFW5AQyCtS55vf7 This cost just under $200. I then decided to make it a cheap as I could whilst keeping the same specs. For this I used a Pi Zero W, the same Pi V2 camera, a DS18B20 and a $7 dummy security camera from Amazon that was not waterproof until I made it so. That's here https://photos.app.goo.gl/VJXURWkrzbK8dSfWA and it cost just over $50 using all new parts that runs off a 1A USB power adapter. I am pretty happy with it and intend moving it to my permanent observatory once that is completed. The software is available above and is obviously free. I hope some of you enjoy it. Pete