Tag Archives: 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)

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]

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

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

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.

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

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)

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.

Continue reading 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)