Time for an upgrade, and an update too...

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 - from time to time). One day I should upgrade to the latest ZWay software (version 2.x) as it is still running v1.7.1 and from the forums, it seems a lot of nice REST APIs were added...
But one thing at a time, for now, got a few experiments to do with the super-powered Raspberry Pi 2 and the camera!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ZWay: getting the device list.

Back after a while... and a son! Here is a piece of code that can be used with the latest version of the ZWay library. It makes it possible to retrieve the Z-Wave device list and display the device names and associated XML file (each recognized device can be associated to an XML that contains a bunch of meta-data: name, description etc.). int main(int argc, char ** argv) { ZWay theZWay; ZWError result; memset(&theZWay, 0, sizeof(theZWay)); result = zway_init(&theZWay, "/dev/ttyAMA0", "/home/pi/src/razberry-proxy/config", "/home/pi/src/razberry-proxy/translations", "/home/pi/src/razberry-proxy/ZDDX", stdout, Warning); if (result == NoError) { result = zway_start(theZWay, &terminationCb); if (result == NoError) { printf("Discovering...\n"); result = zway_discover(theZW
Read more

First steps with the ZWay library

The Z-Wave "RaZberry" installation comes with everything needed to be able to do some custom development in C; everything is installed in the /opt/z-way-server  directory. There, one can find: A set of (documented, nice!) C header files found in /opt/z-way-server/libzway-dev : CommandClassesPublic.h FunctionClassesPublic.h ZDataPublic.h ZDefsPublic.h ZErrors.h ZPlatform.h ZWayLib.h A set of libraries found in /opt/z-way-server/libs : libmicrohttpd.so libv8.so libzwayhttp.so libzwayjs.so libzway.so For the ZWay stack to run properly, it is needed to provide the necessary configuration files. Instead of using these directly from the installation folder, I made a copy in order not to mess up too much with my working/configured setup. The following directories from the ZWay installation folder are needed: config translations ZDDX For experimenting I made a small Makefile in order to build and run. main.out: main.c gcc -I/opt/z-way-server/li
Read more

Libcurl: perform a REST HTTP PUT

The libcurl library does not provide a clear example on how to issue HTTP PUT operations in a REST context; the examples are mainly about file transfers . For my proxy application this is not really what I need: I want to perform a REST HTTP PUT, keep it simple, meaning without using the "Expect" and "Transfer-Encoding" that libcurl adds by default. After some struggling I discovered that this behavior can be changed by using the following code: CURL * pCurl; struct curl_slist *headers = NULL; headers = curl_slist_append(headers, "Content-Type: application/json "); headers = curl_slist_append(headers, "Content-Length: 12345 "); headers = curl_slist_append(headers, "Expect:"); headers = curl_slist_append(headers, "Transfer-Encoding:"); pCurl = curl_easy_init(); curl_easy_setopt(pCurl, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1); curl_easy_setopt(pCurl, CURLOPT_PUT, 1); curl_easy_setopt(pCurl, CURLOPT_URL, " https://your-server.app
Read more