Category Archives: raspberry pi

coding, raspberry pi

Personal Server & Hotspot WIP

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This is a personal server/hotspot – Designed to be used with a Pi Zero-W and an SSD to store TV and other files I need on the move. It’s got a 256gb SSD and can switch between being a hotspot (AP mode, *not* Ad-Hoc, so it works with Android devices too).

256gb of mobile wifi goodness which runs off a USB power socket

It only needs a decent USB power socket and you’re good to go. It has a little screen on the front too which tells you which wifi it’s connected to and what it’s IP address is.

It has Samba set up on it too so as well as ssh/sftp access you can also access it from windows devices.

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projects, raspberry pi

How to turn your Raspberry Pi and an old printer into a print server you can use from any device (including phones & tablets)

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How handy would it be to have a shared network folder where you can drop a PDF to print and it just magically pops out of the printer a couple of mins later? Especially since you can print to PDF from pretty much any platform or device..including mobile phones and tablets. Pretty handy I think! Especially if you can do so with pretty much any old (or even ancient) printer rather than having to buy a funky new bluetooth/wireless one.

Here’s how to do just that…

[EDIT: btw I keep coming back to this howto every time the microSD in the pi which runs our CCTV dies, so it should actually be relatively up to date (~2ys} xD]

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linux, projects, raspberry pi

CCTV GUIDE PART 4 – Archiving and cleanup, and setting up the Live monitor

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If you’ve followed this far and got it working you’ve probably seen this system is going to produce a LOT of JPEG files. Ours spits out around 17,000 per day.  That amount of files is gonna quickly get unmanageable.

Also linux disks tend to have a limited number of “i-nodes”, which work like name tags for files. When your disk runs out of name tags it’s “full” whether it’s actually full to data capacity or not. Storing gazillions of tiny JPEGs is a surefire way to run out of i-nodes quickly.

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linux, projects, raspberry pi

CCTV guide part 3 – Putting it all together –

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Ok so you’ve got the scripts from part 1 and you’ve found your special url from part 2. Now it’s time to bring it all together and actually make it work!

You’ll need some sort of linux pc like a raspberry pi or similar, perhaps even a pi zero, or even just a regular linux pc. I’ve got the live monitoring part running on a Raspberry pi 2 and the logging part running on another random linux pc. It doesn’t really make much difference. The stuff we’re doing here is pretty basic and universal so you should be pretty much good to go regardless of the platform.

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linux, projects, raspberry pi

CCTV guide part 2 – Getting the image off your IP cam

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In this part of the guide we’re going to try and figure out that special url you need in order to pull the images directly off the CCD of your IP cam, which is what you need in order to make the scripts from the previous part of the guide work properly.

I’m going to assume zero prior knowledge so am going to try and explain everything as we go along.

For this exercise this is the camera I’ll be using. It’s just a standard cheapo Wanscam one off ebay. It’s not the IP camera I actually use for our CCTV system but it works the same so will illustrate just how similarly they all work:

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linux, projects, raspberry pi

CCTV Guide part 1 – Turning your Raspberry Pi and pretty much any IP cam into a home security system with logging & archiving, for free (CCTV part 1)

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This post is the first part of a series which shows how to turn your IP-cam and raspberry pi (or other embedded linux machine. pc etc) into a pretty decent and *reliable* security system which logs images, auto archives old images and cleans up after itself.

It’s free, and all you need is a text editor and a bit of time to figure out the particulars for your system.  I’ve done the hard bit which is working out the process and writing the bash scripts to actually do the hard work.

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