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Another Raspberry all sky camera


snowy911

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So, with the help of many online posts, on this forum and others, and taking no credit for the work of others, I've made an all sky camera using Thomas Jacquin's concept, parts bought from Wickes, soil pipe with end caps for £10 and a 50mm drill bit (£8).  Acrylic dome bought from ebay (£10), Raspberry pi (£35), and ZWO ASI120 (astrobuy/sell £70).  With a lot of help from James supporting his excellent oaCapture software, I'm eventually ended up with this:

A 12" long piece of 4" diameter soil pipe with end caps, one with a 50mm hole which perfectly fits the lip on the ZWO ASI120mm camera, covered by the 140mm acrylic done.  I squeezed my pi into the soil pipe (thank you Thomas), and have oaCapture taking images every 300s (thank you James).  The image is saved as a TIFF, then using imagemagick converts to a JPG and has a timestamp added to the image and saves to the html folder.

I then have a very pathetic webpage http://82.13.34.154 which displays the image and updates the 'image only', using a short piece of javascript every 180s  I know I could always just look out the window to see if it's cloudy or not, but this has been much more fun!

Camera going outside this weekend, of course dew will be an issue, however I'm being optimistic and hoping the heat from the pi keeps the dew off!

 

allskya.jpg

allskyb.jpg

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it's the stock 150 degree which comes with the ASI120.  I forgot to mention that the webpage is simply an apache webserver running on the pi, and I just butchered the apache default webpage to see if I could get it all working, so lots of html still on it that is unrequired.  I'll tidy that up another day.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Excellent work.

Have been thinking about doing one of these myself over the last few months, but have wussed out when it comes to configuring the Pi and doing the web side of things as have zero experience at that.

How difficult is that and getting the images saved from there?

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it's genuinely very easy, but of course it also depends on how complicated you want to make it.  As a starting point I just butchered the apache server HTML default page that's installed when you load apache server onto the Pi, to use as a home page.  The javascript was 'borrowed' from another forum, this updates the image every 3 minutes, and then used convert to change the image from a TIFF to a JPG and add a timestamp.  You can see the code by viewing 'source', on my excuse of a website above.  When time permits I'll look at doing something decent, but to be honest I just wanted to see if the sky was clear without getting off the sofa!

The camera is sitting outdoors now, in it's soil pipe housing, but not really producing any decent images in daytime (only put it out yesterday, so will tinker more). However, the images were pretty good last night when the sky was dark and the stars were out.

Next step is to either get the camera producing decent images in daytime, or having it set to image only at night.  Will work on the former and revert to the latter when I've given up!

 

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I have a RPi 2 sat on my desk here in work.

May break thjat back out and see what I can do and get that up and running before I get the hardware bought.

Which distro did you load on to the Pi?  Am going to have to dig up a few guides on that as has been a rather long time since I did anything Pi wise..other than eat lots of them :-)

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Had a go tonight and came to a grinding halt after getting Raspbian onto the card.

Think my main problem is that I have a very old pi.  Have ordered a Pi3 from Amazon and that is due here on friday.  Have a 64GB mSD card already so will have another go at getting it up and running.

Is a bit of a pain as am doing it headless to as my monitors do not have a HDMI input...DP, DVI or VGA is all I have.  May have a HDMI to DVI cable somewhere, will have a dig in the loft and see.

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32 minutes ago, Dr_Ju_ju said:

Beware 64GB cards, I have a few that appear ok & bought from reputable sources, but still won't work properly. They need to be guaranteed fast extreme NOT the ultra's.... 

Is a Samsung one bought from OEM a few years back and sat in my Note 4 unitl I upped it to a 128, so should be ok, fingers crossed

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Think i will have a go at this. I have a pi thats not being used currently. A couple of others are running plex and an arcade machine :)

Awile ago i had one of my pi's set up to measure the temperarure outside and log this to a graph which i could view on a website. 

So I might set the temperature logging back up again along with a camera.  

I need another project to do and this seems ideal, alot better than all the decorating i have got to do!

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