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.
Making the world a better place, one piece at a time
We’ll be tackling several long-delayed household projects during the next month. As a consequence, I won’t be doing my usual techie tinkering and will post shop notes only occasionally.
There’s not much to say about scraping, priming, and repainting, other than that it’s an ugly job which must get done!
If only we could train the turkeys to scrape the rail …
The config/hostname.conf file (found under /system/sdcard/when the camera is running) file defines the camera’s name:
Cam4That file overrides the contents of the usual etc/hostname.conf file, somewhat to my surprise, which remains the default Ingenic-uc1_1.
The bin/hostname utility returns the hostname:
[root@Cam4 ~]# which hostname
/bin/hostname
[root@Cam4 ~]# hostname
Cam4You can automagically get the hostname in the on-screen display by modifying the OSD formatting variable in config/osd.conf:
OSD="$(/bin/hostname) %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"Which works because the main OSD script sources the config file to set the variable:
It’s also helpful (at least for my purposes) to add the hostname to the image filenames. A one-line tweak in the scripts/detectionOn.sh script does the trick:
snapshot_filename=$(/bin/hostname)_$(date "$snapshot_pattern")Which produces names along these lines:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ed root 246K Apr 23 2019 Cam4_2019-04-23_17.51.02.jpg*
Having source code makes simple changes like this … simple!
After converting another fluorescent shoplight into an LED fixture, I tested its capacitors:
The ESR02 reports one as a 4.8 µF capacitor, the other as a “defective part” with a 4 kΩ resistance. Having a cap fail by turning into a resistor is surprising; I’m more surprised it didn’t simply burn up.
They’re visually indistinguishable, of course.
Installing the Xiaomi Dafang Hacks firmware requires an MicroSD card in each camera and, my previous stock having run low, four more just arrived:
Prices have collapsed to the point where known-good (all four passed f3probe testing) cards direct from Samsung (as opposed to Amazon’s “commingled inventory” counterfeit situation) now cost $12-ish each with free shipping.
After I finish fiddling with the first camera, I’ll copy its card onto these four, unique-ify the IP addresses / hostnames /suchlike, and bring ’em all online.
Given a camera running Xiaomi Dafang Hacks software, you can set up motion-triggered image capture and save the images either locally or on an FTP server. The latter makes sense, as it automatically plunks the images where they’re more generally available.
Define the FTP server parameters in config/motion.conf:
# Configure FTP snapshots and videos
ftp_snapshot=true
ftp_video=false
ftp_video_duration=10
ftp_host="192.168.1.10"
ftp_port=21
ftp_username="ftp-user-id"
ftp_password="secret-password"
ftp_stills_dir="Cam4"
ftp_videos_dir="Cam4"The FTP server should have the Cam4 directory in place and shared for read-write access before attempting to plunk files therein. Ahem.
The camera’s Services menu leads to the motion configuration page:
Limiting the detection region to the lower-left corner cuts out all the waving-in-the-breeze foliage in the yard, while covering the driveway. High sensitivity detects squirrel-sized objects in the foreground, although your mileage will certainly differ.
The camera seems rate-limited at 5 s/image, which may come from FTP transfer overhead; I don’t know if the code includes a built-in delay or if it just works like that. The NAS drive requires upwards of 7 s to spin up if it hasn’t been used for a while, but afterwards the transfers don’t take that long.
Mounting the NAS drive’s CIFS shared directory from my desktop PC works as before:
sudo mount -v -o rw,credentials=/root/.nas-id,vers=1.0,uid=ed -t cifs //192.168.1.10/Cam4 /mnt/partThen view / edit / delete images as needed:
The camera has built-in IR LEDs, but they’re nowhere near powerful enough to illuminate the entire yard.
Motion detection works better in daylight:
Unlike the original Wyze firmware, the Xiaomi Dafang Hacks firmware & software keep all the images & metadata within my network and under my control.
With the Wyze and Xiamoi Dafang cameras running the Xiaomi-Dafang Hacks firmware and software, I tried the timelapse functions on the yard camera.
The config/timelapse.conf file:
# Interval between snaps, in seconds
TIMELAPSE_INTERVAL=10
# Duration of the script should run, in minutes, set to 0 for unlimited
TIMELAPSE_DURATION=60
# Save dir config
SAVE_DIR_PER_DAY=1
# Enable compression
COMPRESSION_QUALITY=100The images, named along the lines of 13-04-2019_191810_001.jpg, appear in the DCIM/timelapse directory, tucked into daily directories with names like 2019-04-13, a mismatch obviously in need of tweaking. There’s also a time_lapse directory which seems like cruft from an earlier revision; you can configure the target directory in scripts/timelapse.sh.
Start the script manually or from a crontab entry, wait until it’s done, then transfer the images to somewhere more convenient with a Bash one-liner:
find /system/sdcard/DCIM/timelapse/ -name \*jpg -exec curl -s -n -T {} ftp://192.168.1.10/Timelapse/ \; The -s silences all curl output; omit it until you’re sure the lashup works as you expect. I always forget the backslash before the semicolon terminating the -exec command.
The -n pulls the userID and password from the ~/.netrc file you previously set up for manual ftp sessions:
machine 192.168.1.10
login ftp-user-id
password secret-passwordThe IP address corresponds to my ancient NAS drive; your mileage may vary.
From my desktop box, mount the NAS drive:
sudo mount -t cifs -o "credentials=/root/.nas-id,vers=1.0,uid=ed" "//nasty/Timelapse" /mnt/partThe drive’s credentials aren’t particularly secret, but tucking them into /root/.nas-id means you could automount the drive with no hassle. The NAS drive requires the oldest possible CIFS version, of course.
Then view the pix:
You could set up the camera as an NFS share, but having all the cameras deposit their pix in a common location seems more convenient, particularly after I get around to automating the image transfer. Regrettably, the NAS drive doesn’t support subdirectories.
According to its description, the Anker USB 3.0 card reader can handle both a MicroSD and a standard SD card at once:
Simultaneously read and write on two cards to save yourself the effort of constant unplugging and re-plugging.
Which looks like this:
After you get used to inserting the SD card downside-up, it fits perfectly. The Kapton tape on the MicroSD card eases extraction from the still finger-dent-less M20 camera mount on the back of my Tour Easy ‘bent.
Plugged into a USB 3.0 port, my file extractor script chugs along at 25.9 MB/s, taking about 18 minutes to transfer 28 GB of video data.
Splurging another eleven bucks for a second reader produces this setup:
After plugging both readers into adjacent USB 3.0 ports, the script transfers files at 46.6 MB/s and copies 28 GB in 10 minutes.
So, yes, the reader can handle two cards at once, but at half the speed.
Not life-changing, but it shows why I like measurements so much …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 