Micks Distractions

Due to some very cre­ative demol­ish­ers ‘touch­ing’ the side of my box, I’ve had to remake a new one. My dad whipped one up for me. Of course, when you do some­thing again you tend to do it bet­ter the next time round. I’ve used a lot of the com­po­nents of the orig­i­nal cam­era box, but added a few. Namely an addi­tional lap­top, WiFi, and a wire­less X10 device to turn off the cam­era PC remotely.

One thing I’ve learnt from all this is that if you want to have a PC sit­ting
some­where remote doing some­thing — make sure that there are mul­ti­ple
ways of con­tact­ing it and con­trol­ling it. The box I have setup has a modem,
cable modem, WiFi, local LAN, remote power con­trol, and power pro­tec­tion. Good
enough for a Mars land­ing! Well, at least if some­thing goes wrong with one
method, there’s a backup.

Box details:

• Linux — Of course! Don’t expect to do any­thing fancy like this with any­thing else.


• 800MHz PC — not really pow­er­full, but enough.


• 20G disk — gobs of stor­age, enough for 1 month of photos.


• 5 port USB card — for all those cameras.


• 2x net­work cards — one for the cable modem, the other for my laptop.


• Key­board — stu­pid PC doesn’t like boot­ing with­out one.


• -


• Lap­top — An old 100MHz job with a 1G disk.


• WiFi — A cheapo $20 WiFi card.


• 3c589 — To talk to the cam­era PC.


• -


• Modem — just in case some­thing goes wrong.


• Cable modem — for upload­ing to backup server, and webserver.


• 5 Benq DC1300 cam­eras — nice 125 degree panorama!


• mini hub — so the PCs can talk.


• Wire­less X10 remote — to turn off the cam­era PC remotely.

Cam­era drivers:

I had to alter an exist­ing Linux ker­nel dri­ver for the Benq DC1300 cam­eras. These are based on the SPCA504b chipset. Michel Xhaard has done a lot of back­ground work in get­ting a dri­ver going for other cam­eras. The dri­ver for the Benq DC1300 isn’t per­fect, as there are some pecu­liar­i­ties that crop up from time to time. But I can work around those easy enough. I didn’t get time to fix any of these prob­lems — oh well.

Lap­top:

The rea­son for the lap­top is three-fold:

1. I can remotely reboot the cam­era PC if some­thing goes wrong. The cam­era PC has been setup to run the con­sole through ser­ial.

2. I can drive up to my house and my other lap­top can start rsync-ing data from the cam­era box.

3. I can stroll onto the block with my iPAQ and see what it sees/control the cameras/reboot the box if needed.

X10 remote control:

I have a prob­lem with the cam­era dri­vers that I haven’t been able to fix, and they basi­cally die, never to be seen on the USB bus until a phys­i­cal poweroff. This means that the PC needs to be turned off because they pro­vide power to the cam­eras. So.… Enter the remote con­trol X10 device. My wife can now drive up to the block, and turn it off and on again, with­out get­ting out of the car. If I have enough time I will hack some­thing off the par­al­lel port of the lap­top to con­trol it.

Con­struc­tion piccies.

Click on the images for a big­ger view.




The plain car­cas of the MarkII cam­era box. One annoy­ing thing with the last box
was the fact that when the front cover was lifted up, it shifted the cam­eras.
Now it doesn’t.

And the final box sealed and painted. You can see the gen­er­ous amounts of sealant in the box. Also, a handy shelf. The orig­i­nal box that houses the cam­eras are
yet to be put on.

And now things being loaded into it. The plas­tic sheet­ing is to avoid water get­ting in via the cracks, (a key­board was killed because of this). Also the shroud
on top of the cam­eras was trimmed a lit­tle as they were get­ting in the way of
the images being taken.

An inte­rior close-up shot. The cable modem is on the left. Just above it is the hub so that the two PCs can talk to each other, (yes — I COULD have used a cross-over cable but I didn’t have one handy). The cam­era PC is on the top shelf, (wrapped in bubble-wrap and securely tied in with vel­cro should the whole box fall off the tree again). The console/WiFi lap­top is on the bot­tom shelf. Under­neath that is where all the cables go; a-la com­puter room. I like nice tidy cables.

Test­ing the box out. Look ma! No cables! The lap­top sit­ting on the bench was talk­ing to the cam­era box via WiFi. There’s also the X10 remote con­trol there as well.

And the final test­ing phase. If you look care­fully on the lap­top you can see
an image that I just took. Just a bor­ing photo of a garage.

Aaaaand up the tree it goes! Note very care­fully that I am attach­ing it to the
other fork of the tree! This will give it some pro­tec­tion, and avoid it
being “touched” by any trades­peo­ple. You can see the old bolts on the
other fork of the tree. The lap­top looks like it’s just about to fall out — it’s
not. It is just sit­ting up at an angle for easy view­ing, (and also the bloody
power cable didn’t fit in — I think the first rea­son is bet­ter).

And a long-shot of it up the tree. Looks con­spic­u­ous dun­nit? Just looks like a
plain old possie box eh? Well, from the road it does any­way. The new improved
MarkII slim­line ver­sion allows it to be hid­den from view. (Sorry no steak knives.)

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