Online webcam project, part 2.

Trigger warning.

Stop! Don’t look at the following photographs if you are offended by ugly applications of hot glue.

I found what I thought would be the ideal case for the camera and Pi in the kitchen. It was one of those Tesco plastic food boxes with clips and a watertight seal, and it had nasty cracks in the base in just the right spot to cut a hole for the lens. Using a variety of inappropriate tools, I made the necessary hole, and fixed the lens into it with hot glue.

Ugly hot glue!

As I warned you, very ugly hot glue. Note that it covers the join between the two parts of the lens, which I hope will ensure our good Welsh rain can’t get in between the lens elements. The next steps were to screw the inner lens cap in place, and mount the Raspberry Pi Zero inside the box. I was going to put it in the same part of the box as the lens and camera, but every arrangement I tried had the USB wireless antenna rather close to the camera and its cable. So, I mounted the Pi Zero in the lid of the box with a goodly lump of White Tac.

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A notch in the edge of the box, for the power cable, was the next thing. It’s at the bottom, and only a very small percentage of the rain around here falls upwards, so it may be OK without any sealant. I have more White Tac if there is a problem…

Software

Getting the camera to take a picture every ten minutes is not a problem, thanks to cron and the bash shell.

The intention is to use lftp to upload the pictures to the web host, but finding a decent example of code that will do that is not proving easy. Please feel free to comment if you have something suitable.

I shouldn’t have too much difficulty hacking out a web page for the picture to live in, as I am not planning anything fancy, so I’ll just use HTML, like the rest of my site.

Online webcam project, part 1.

Having decided to share the view at the back of our house with the rest of the world, I’ve finally got started. After all, it’s a pretty amazing view at times. Here’s what it was like recently. Even when it’s blurred, it’s good!

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I’m using a standard Raspberry Pi camera, and a Pi Zero to do this. Here’s the camera. I took a cheap Vivitar wide angle converter, made a hole in the rear lens cap, and glued the camera’s mounting kit to it, using a cheap glue gun.

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Here’s the current state of the thing.

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I connected to the PI with x11vnc, and took a test shot. The result is nicely in focus, thanks to the cunning design of the adapter lens, and gives a good wide angle view of the study.

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Next, I need to set up the Raspberry Pi to upload pictures to my web site every few minutes, make a page on the web site for people to gawp at, and put the Pi in a waterproof case.

How not to do photography.

Well, I woke up this morning… (generic blues verse)

I woke up at four in the morning, for no obvious reason, and noticed that there was very bright moonlight outside, and pretty fog in the lower ground areas. The moon was very high, though, and I would have had to use a wide angle lens, which would have made all the trees look small, so I decided to wake up again in a couple of hours, reasoning that the moon should be about 30º lower in the sky, by then.

Amazingly, I woke up at six-ish. A quick squint through the viewfinder  showed I was going to need 30 second exposures. So I went and got the tripod, and opened the bedroom window wide. Autofocus couldn’t find anything to lock on to, so I switched it off. Turned the focus ring to what I thought was infinity, and it looked OK in the viewfinder.

Mistake one. It was actually quite badly out of focus.

Mistake two. I had been taking pictures for eBay, and had left the camera set on low resolution.

Mistake three. I realised this after four shots or so, and thought I had changed it, but forgot to press Set.

Mistake four was stopping to load the first four pictures onto the computer to see how they looked. While I did that, it clouded over.

Incidentally, I have no idea why WordPress chooses to put the pictures in a sequence that is unrelated to the order they were taken in.

Mistake five was not bothering to get the remote shutter release thingy, as I thought any shaking from just pressing the button would hardly matter in a 30 second exposure.

Here are the results. Try to pretend not to see any of the problems, because they are really rather pretty anyway…..

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A recent lasagne…

IMG_20160830_173149Here are some of the things I used to make a recent lasagne. It’s fairly hard to see, but there’s a bowl of home grown garlic at the back, on the right. Just push garlic cloves that are too small to bother peeling into the ground. A few months later, they will have multiplied enormously, and somehow pulled themselves down until they are six inches underground. I have no idea how they manage to do that, but they do. I must remember to ask my favourite botanist, if he ever visits us.

IMG_20160830_175521This is the humble, yet powerful, Oxo cube that I used, to flavour the rather insipid looking beef mince. Some people tear the foil off, and crumble the cube with their fingers. Try this… Pull the little flaps out as shown, and hit the cube a couple of times IMG_20160830_175534with your palm, until it is flattened. Now you can just rip it and tip the powdered Oxo straight into the pan. Isn’t that clever? I would credit the source of the tip, if I could remember it.

IMG_20160830_175603That meat will need to be browned properly, of course, before you carry on making the sauce, but you know that, don’t you? I wasn’t following a recipe, just doing what seemed likely to be the way I have made lasagne before.

IMG_20160830_181542Now some recipes have you put layers of sauce in with the layers of meat and pasta. I don’t do that, mainly because it increases hugely the amount of sauce you will need, and tends to make the final dish sloppy. I have been known to put in layers of grated cheese, and that can work quite well, but this lasagne didn’t have any.

Making the sauce is something one IMG_20160830_182615ends up knowing how to do without measuring things. A lump of butter of a certain size. A big, but not too big, spoonful of flour. Do not forget Colman’s mustard powder, about half a teaspoonful. It’s not enough to make the sauce taste mustardy, but it will seem dull if you forget to put it in. IMG_20160830_182651The butter and flour have to be cooked until there is what one recipe book describes as a “biscuity smell”.

You can see how it looks after the first little bit of milk has been added, in the third shot of the pan. Gradually, more milk is added, until the sauce seems runny enough to add grated IMG_20160830_182728cheese. Please use a decent Cheddar, not soapy cheap stuff.

Lately, I have taken to cooking the layered meat sauce and pasta while I make the cheese sauce for the top, and that does help to prevent it from being sloppy. The result can be seen in the last IMG_20160830_194550picture, along with a salad that miraculously appeared while the lasagne was cooking.

Nice tins of cider also got onto the table, and made the meal even more pleasant.