Yet Another Developer Blog

For my home alarm system, I defined the following important requirements: It should be possible to contact and control remotely (e.g. turn off/on the alarm while not at home) the system. The latency for reacting to remote control commands should be as fast as possible (e.g. not more than 1-2 seconds). And there I go, starting to implement the security of my home service HTTP endpoints... configuring the Ruby Sinatra framework to use SSL , to have basic HTTP authentication... setting up port forwarding on the home gateway... That sounds ok, works ok, until thinking about using a "backup network"; what I have always foreseen in my home alarm system, is to use an external WiFi external access-point as fallback when my home gateway network is down; nowadays it is indeed easy and common to use your ISP special WiFi access points, available everywhere in the country. A quick scan around shows already 3 of these access points in the neighbourhood (one of course being linked

I have been waiting for a long time to get myself one these Raspberry Pi cameras. From the beginning I wanted to experiment with a camera, movement detection, making some time-lapse videos... Unfortunately when I tried initially with my good old Logitech 4400 webcam, it did not work so well. Something was wrong with the USB driver? Not clear, but at the end I never managed to get it working well. Recently, well a few months ago already, the 2nd big version of the Raspberry Pi got out. The perfect opportunity to get an upgrade for my existing system. The camera is nice: simple setup, works out of the box. The  documentation  is great and better, the default distribution (Raspian) got all these nice shell command lines to control the camera. This opens a bunch of new ideas, things to try out in the future :-) The "old" Raspberry Pi is still running, my home "alarm/surveillance" system (still based on my  Ruby ZWay wrapper library , that I update and improve -