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Raspberry Pi AllSky Camera


Pete6

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36 minutes ago, Mognet said:

I have mine up and running, but pointing out of the spare room winow for now. Looks like the double glazing is giving a green cast to the light domes of London and Chelmsford

And not only can I see it's a clear night, but a near neighbour has left their bright bathroom light on. Again. 🤬

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I've tinkered with the settings to give a 1600x1200 display so that the image is bigger on my tablet and phone. Need to fix the sunset time

I'll send up the bat signal from Chelmsford to see if you can see it in the camera LOL 

 

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Have adjusted the image deletion line, taken delivery of a V2 camera and now giving it a trial run out side.

Obviously not it’s final enclosure but wanted to see how it goes and I’ve also covered that green led for the night. 

Also only stock lens at the moment so need to order a wide angle.  So far the only expenditure on this project is a temp probe for £2 and the new camera at £24.  I had the zero in stock.

Strange thing happened today - I have a second zero which I soldered with the temp probe (the other is attached to a header) and power hardwired into the base and it was very unstable.  Kept crashing and rebooting, so I have relegated that one back to the shed and using the original one for now. 

 

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Update - Ran all night no problems and the modification to remove the 110kb limit gave me a 22 second video which is about right given how short “night” is at the moment. 
 

Minor change to display banner text on video and proper enclosure is next on the list and then I think I’m done. 
 

Thanks Jason & Pete - this has been an enjoyable distraction. 

804B6E02-178A-4B1C-80DA-F244DD5E6F4D.jpeg

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It's a nice easy project. There's a couple of bits where the installation instructions need a little improvement, and there might be some differences between the with and without temperature probe html versions. My projects for today, once I've got the dull work stuff out of the way, are to wipe the card for the Pi and start again from the beginning to see if minor display issues were me or not, and to design and print an indoor case I can put in the window

All the outdoor stuff and the associated solar power can wait until I have a shed to mount it on

Total spend so far is £13 for the Pi Zero WH, £27 for a 5MP fisheye lens camera, and £4 for a camera adaptor cable. Total £44, but still needs a case and its own power supply

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On 20/06/2020 at 10:18, wormix said:

Make sure you download the entire package and follow the instructions in the README file as they are formatted better than direct off github. 
 

I found copying the file lock stock over to the home directory and then following the instructions in README to work for the most part, just had to create the temporary movie files and edit out some text in the webcam.php file as I’m not running a temp sensor. 
 

Daytime was seemless yesterday and today - nighttime was working but video is only 5 seconds long, need to explore why that may be. 
 

Mine was also a virgin raspbian build 

Still having problems virgin build on an 3b+ Buster. cloned site into home directory logged in as pi yet when i try and run 

service lighttpd force-reload
echo '<?php phpinfo(); ?>' | tee /var/www/phpinfo.php
 

get access denied

????

also when opening localhost.local get error 404

following the script from readme.md

 

do you guys execute these commands from

Most of this information came from https://www.dronkert.net/rpi/webcam.html
which is what this project is based upon.
 

 

Edited by fozzybear
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7 minutes ago, fozzybear said:

Still having problems virgin build on an 3b+ Buster. cloned site into home directory logged in as pi yet when i try and run 

service lighttpd force-reload
echo '<?php phpinfo(); ?>' | tee /var/www/phpinfo.php
 

get access denied

????

also when opening localhost.local get error 404

following the script from readme.md

 

do you guys execute these commands from

Most of this information came from https://www.dronkert.net/rpi/webcam.html
which is what this project is based upon.
 

 

You need admin privileges to start/stop services, try putting 'sudo' in front. I skipped the php test page I think when I did and just copied what I needed into /var/www/html

sudo service lighttpd force-reload

 

 

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51 minutes ago, fozzybear said:

Still having problems virgin build on an 3b+ Buster. cloned site into home directory logged in as pi yet when i try and run 

service lighttpd force-reload
echo '<?php phpinfo(); ?>' | tee /var/www/phpinfo.php
 

get access denied

????

also when opening localhost.local get error 404

following the script from readme.md

 

do you guys execute these commands from

Most of this information came from https://www.dronkert.net/rpi/webcam.html
which is what this project is based upon.
 

 

I ignored all the Dronkert stuff, that’s just in there for info. 
 

Copy the download from github and save it so your file structure is /home/allsky and as Jason says, copy the html files into /var/www when it asks you to. 

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1 minute ago, wormix said:

I ignored all the Dronkert stuff, that’s just in there for info. 
 

Copy the download from github and save it so your file structure is /home/allsky and as Jason says, copy the html files into /var/www when it asks you to. 

it was really watering me off just error after error....

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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

 

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4 minutes ago, Mognet said:

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

Because "there's always more than one way to do it"...

"sudo -s" also gives you an interactive root shell.  And instead of typing "exit" you can use "ctrl-D".

:)

James

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9 minutes ago, JamesF said:

Because "there's always more than one way to do it"...

"sudo -s" also gives you an interactive root shell.  And instead of typing "exit" you can use "ctrl-D".

:)

James

That’s just crazy talk - no idea what any of that means!!!!???

 

i ended up setting Root password and logging in as Root to install, but those ways seem easier. 

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15 minutes ago, wormix said:

That’s just crazy talk - no idea what any of that means!!!!???

 

i ended up setting Root password and logging in as Root to install, but those ways seem easier. 

sudo is "substituting for this user user, do..." and defaults to the root user. sudo -s says "make a shell as this user" - a shell being the thing you're typing into.

root is the superuser account and best left alone if you can avoid it - you should never have to install or run anything as root (and this particularly goes for web applications). You want to run applications as a user - pi is the usual one. Your web server will also run with an "unpriviledged" account. The point being that if anything goes wrong or someone tries to make anything go wrong (i.e. attacks) then a user without full access can't do too much. Whereas if you're root, you can do anything.

System configuration such as configuring systemd is often something that requires root access, so you use sudo to temporarily elevate your session for a given command. This avoids logging in as root etc.

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2 minutes ago, discardedastro said:

sudo is "substituting for this user user, do..." and defaults to the root user. sudo -s says "make a shell as this user" - a shell being the thing you're typing into.

root is the superuser account and best left alone if you can avoid it - you should never have to install or run anything as root (and this particularly goes for web applications). You want to run applications as a user - pi is the usual one. Your web server will also run with an "unpriviledged" account. The point being that if anything goes wrong or someone tries to make anything go wrong (i.e. attacks) then a user without full access can't do too much. Whereas if you're root, you can do anything.

System configuration such as configuring systemd is often something that requires root access, so you use sudo to temporarily elevate your session for a given command. This avoids logging in as root etc.

Makes sense, cheers. 
Learning all this as I go along so good to get these tips. 

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Just now, wormix said:

Makes sense, cheers. 
Learning all this as I go along so good to get these tips. 

Linux is a bit of a complex beast, but worth learning in my view (I'm a recovering sysadmin so I've been fettling Linux boxes for over a decade now, but I've honestly never stopped using it - it's everywhere now and the Pi ecosystem is just one big example). The nice thing is that much like astronomy you don't need to know it all at once - you can very much learn as you go once you have the basics down. The "Unix philosophy" is about making lots of small things that do one thing (and preferably only one thing) well, and making it easy to put them together to do more complicated things, which lends itself well to lots of engineering disciplines in terms of the thinking, I think.

My weatherproof box (just a big junction box) and cable glands have arrived, waiting on the dome now to have a crack at this myself - think I will use my 120MC for testing as I've got that to hand while the AP rig is dismantled for summer, but will pick up a Pi HQ camera board next month, and maybe a 3D printer to make an adjustable mount within the box to hold it at the right point within the dome.

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On 06/06/2020 at 15:11, jiberjaber said:

Wow - this has been a busy day on this.  I thought a bit more about the use of the banner text version and decided it was better to not have the execution of the php in cron but to just execute it before the picture is copied, so to this end I removed the cron entry part listed above and modified the copypic.sh script.  There is now a true/false option so if you want to use the banner version of the image in the movies you can, if not, then it is ignored, if you want to give this a go, replace copypic.sh with the following:

 


 

Finally got round to updating copypic.sh to show the banner text.  Works flawlessly.

Have sourced a dome and a friend is 3D printing a camera mount / M12 Lens fitting for a 160 degree lens I acquired so hopefully not long till its ready to go.  

Weirdly one of my Pi Zeros doesn't like being connected up to USB power banks - it keeps resetting after  a few minutes  - whereas the other runs happily on it.  Power longer term will be via 12v Lead Acid / Solar panel.  Interested to see how the M12 lens performs

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30 minutes ago, wormix said:

Finally got round to updating copypic.sh to show the banner text.  Works flawlessly.

Have sourced a dome and a friend is 3D printing a camera mount / M12 Lens fitting for a 160 degree lens I acquired so hopefully not long till its ready to go.  

Weirdly one of my Pi Zeros doesn't like being connected up to USB power banks - it keeps resetting after  a few minutes  - whereas the other runs happily on it.  Power longer term will be via 12v Lead Acid / Solar panel.  Interested to see how the M12 lens performs

I have found the M12 pretty good considering the budget approach to all this! 

2 new lenses arrived this week for me to try - which might be today's job, the current lens is 1.8mm and I now have a 1.5mm & 1.4mm to try out :) I'm a bit suspicious of the 1.4mm as whilst it looks like it might be wide angle it's a lot smaller than the 1.5.

Here's the 1.8mm one at the moment:

[webcam]

 

I'll report back on the 1.4/1.5 experiments... 

 

image.png.b7e2433f0f4f03dc0978812ccc975977.png

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So the 1.4mm was't 1.4mm as I suspected but the 1.5mm lens gives a much wider view though a bit darker. - will have to see how good the focus is if there are are stars out tonight - rain stopped play for now...

 

[webcam]

 

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So I've been out and fettled with the focus a bit again, this time I climbed onto the roof out of a window, it's a bit easier than getting the ladder out and taking down the camera but I always worry about the roof when walking on it. I think it's a bit better focused but looks about the same as the capture from yesterday but it was very out of focus overnight (though no stars but the roof ariel was blurred) will see how this pans out - I've had this before due to temperature build up in the dome and seemed to be indicative of the lens not being straight on to the sensor - I think this might be similar looking at the trees out of focus bottom right. 

[webcam]

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