The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Photography & Images

Taking & making images.

Raspberry Pi Yard Camera
The yard camera I mentioned a few days ago consists of a Raspberry Pi 3 with an Official V2 Pi Camera peering through two layers of 1955-era window glass into our back yard:

Back Yard Camera setup – 2017-03-13

Yes, that’s black duct tape holding it to the window pane. The extension cord draped across the floor gotta go, too.

This being a made-in-haste lashup, I used the streamEye MJPEG HTTP streamer, started from /etc/rc.local in the usual way:
```
logger -s Starting camera streamer
sudo -u pi sh -c '/home/pi/yardcam.sh' &
logger -s Camera running
```
The yardcam.sh script feeds one moderate-quality frame to the streamer every second:
```
/home/pi/streameye/extras/raspimjpeg.py -w 1280 -h 720 -r 1 -q 80 | streameye
```
MJPEG has a lot to dislike as a streaming video format. In particular, without any hint of inter-frame compression, the network usage gets way too high for any reasonable frame rate.

But it got the camera up & running in time for the March snowfall:

Fun in Snow – 2017-03-15

In a nod to IoT security, the Raspberry Pi’s wireless interface sits behind the router’s firewall on our guest network, with no access to the devices on our main network. The router passes a one-port peephole from the Internet to the Pi, which protects all the other services from unwarranted attention.

The router maintains a dynamic DNS record with a (not particularly) mnemonic URL, which seems better than an ever-changing dotted-quad IP address.

Because the router doesn’t support hairpin connections from the main network to the guest network, I can’t monitor the video from my desktop through the outwardly visible URL. Instead, I must fire up a laptop, connect to the guest network, then connect directly to the camera at camera.local.

You do not have a Need To Know for the URL; I’m sure it’ll appear on Shodan. I plan to take it down when the snow melts.
2017-03-20
Monthly Image: Turkey Vulture Sunning

This must feel soooo good:

Turkey Vulture atop utility pole – alert

Just close your eyes and soak up the warmth of the sun:

Turkey Vulture atop utility pole – snoozing

Turkey vultures look imposing, even with all that flight hardware tucked away:

Turkey Vulture on branch

However, I think this is a low-status bird, because those splashes on the left wing look a lot like bird crap…

Taken with the DSC-H5, zoomed all the way tight with the 1.7× teleadapter, handheld on a lovely sunny day.

Update: Because I write these posts a few days in advance of their appearance, I didn’t know yesterday’s weather would look like this:

Driveway clearing – 2017-03-14

That’s a screenshot from a Raspberry Pi streaming camera I set up so a friend in North Carolina could gloat.

I suppose the vultures huddle in a tree, as do the turkeys, and await better flying conditions.

Enjoy the sun while it shines!

2017-03-15
Red Oaks Mill Dam Ice

Custom-trimmed icicles festoon a tree trunk lodged over the crumbling Red Oaks Mill dam:

Red Oaks Mill Dam – ice formation

Last September those logs were in the same position:

Wappinger Creek – Red Oaks Mill Dam – 2016-09-23

The lighter debris comes and goes at the whim of the waters.

The sprayward side of this branch must have an inch of ice wrapped around it:

Red Oaks Mill Dam – ice coated branch

A quiet day for a walk…

2017-02-19
Turkeys in the Snow

These guys looked completely disgusted with the situation:

Turkeys on rail fence in snow

They’re about 130 feet away in a heavy snowstorm that eventually deposited about a foot of wet snow on the area.

The top rail really does slant downward: the tenon on the right end broke and fell out of the mortise.

The DSC-H5 carries the 1.7× teleadapter, zoomed all the way tight through two layers of 1955-ish window glass, hand-held, braced against the pane.

The day before that snowstorm, we biked 18 miles out-and-back over the Walkway in beautiful, sunny, mid-50s (°F) weather:

KE4ZNU-9 – APRS track – 2017-02-08

We ride when we can and shovel when we must!

2017-02-18
Monthly Image: Turkeys in the Trees

A turkey flock forages through the bottomlands along the Wappinger Creek and, at night, roosts in the trees at the far end of our driveway:

Roosting Turkeys – visible

I’m a sucker for that moon:

Roosting Turkeys – visible

It’s rising into the eastward-bound cloud cover bringing a light snowfall, so we missed the penumbral eclipse.

If you’re counting turkeys, it’s easier with a contrasty IR image:

Roosting Turkeys – infra-red mode

Mary recently counted forty turkeys on the ground, so that’s just part of their flock. I think their air boss assigns one turkey per branch for safety; they weigh upwards of 10 pounds each!

Taken with the DSC-H5 and DSC-F717, both the the 1.7× teleadapter, hand-held in cold weather.

Searching the blog for turkey will turn up more pix, including my favorite IR turkey shot.

2017-02-15
Electronics vs. Dark Rooms

Despite its diminutive size, the white LED on the end of the Dell AC511 USB SoundBar lights up a dark bedroom surprisingly well:

Dell AC511 USB SoundBar – white power LED

That’s pretty much the only power-on indicator for the streaming players, so I didn’t want to just slap a strip of black tape over it. Instead, because white LEDs don’t emit much energy toward the red end of the spectrum, I made a cute little filter from a snippet of Primary Red gel filter material, surrounded by a black Gorilla Tape donut:

Red filter for Dell AC511 USB power LED

Two layers of Primary Red cut the light intensity to a dim glow that’s barely visible in daylight and completely inoffensive at night:

Red filter for Dell AC511 – installed

The blue activity LED on the SunFounder got the black electrical tape treatment, however, with just a sliver showing through to give a hint that it’s still active:

SunFounder RT5370 USB WiFi Adapter – masked LED

One of the other WiFi adapters has a pinhole over a red LED that’s barely visible. Another, seemingly identical one, lacks the red LED under the pinhole; when I asked the vendor about that, I was told it was removed “to save power.” Yeah, right. That was part of the motivation to try a different adapter next time around, with good results.

Of course, you must wrap an opaque black case around the Raspberry Pi to tamp down the red and green LEDs on the PCB. It’s possible to control them in software, with varying degrees of difficulty depending on which Pi you have, but …

2017-01-12
Airliner Over Snow

Poughkeepsie lies under the southbound airliner routes to the NYC airports, so we often see airplanes high overhead. With a few inches of snow on the ground, a sunny day turns them brilliant white against a blue sky:

Air Canada Flight 706 – Embraer ERJ-190 – snow uplight

Feeding “Poughkeepsie NY” into FlightAware produces a map centered over us with (in this case) two candidates, one of which was Air Canada Flight 706, an Embraer ERJ-190. The obvious search produces pictures confirming the ID.

Air Canada’s current livery shows white paint on the bottom, but plain aluminum bodies shine brilliantly, too.

Back when I used to fly, light snow highlighted the networks of stone walls around all the old farms across the Northeast, from back when this area was NYC’s breadbasket. Those days are gone, but the stones remain where those farmers hauled them out of the fields.

2016-12-31