Arkadian.eu

29 Aug 2011
Omnima UK sell a tiny little board for less than £40, that runs on openWRT Linux and has ethernet, WiFi and a USB port. It seems to be a great base for simple projects, when we need more power than one arduino.

Link to product

I’ve ordered one to try something I have in mind.

Btw, at the openWRT site, there is a VM available. I downloaded and tried it yesterday, but I had problems connecting USB peripherals…. Never mind. I have to say I loved the web interface and the precompiled binaries and the fact you can ran python on it!

11 Sep 2011
I’ve now received the device. It runs Fonera (have a look at some screenshots and more info here). Easy to access through a web interface. I tried to load the latest Fonera software and it didn’t quite work; now the device won’t boot. I’m able to log in to it using telnet and a serial cable, but I haven’t been able to load the old bin file yet… I’ll keep you posted…

For a while now, I have been thinking about putting together a video surveillance system at home, based on linux, webcams and python. I’m aware that out of the box systems exist, but I wanted to create something more personalised, which, let’s face it, it’s more fun!

After reading a bit online, I decided to use a command-line tool to grab frames from my webcams. There is a little program called “streamer” which allows you to save frames from the various webcams as jpegs (or videos if you like). In ubuntu type

sudo apt-get install streamer

to install it and then something like:

streamer -q -c /dev/video1 -b 32 -s 1600×1200 -o outfile.jpeg to take a snapshot of whatever dev/video1 is looking at… (look at streamer –help for more options).

My python script will be checking for new jpegs on a regular basis and will be uploading them on a remote ftp server. The complete python script will (hopefully) follow shortly.

O2, the UK mobile phone operator had an amazing offer a few days ago: they were selling their O2 Joggler for £49.99.

This little gadget, with a touchscreen, wifi and an intel atom processor, wasn’t really a best seller for your average cosumer and O2 ended up selling them at a loss.

I picked one up and installed Ubuntu successfully on an 8GB stick, following religiously the instructions from this
site.

Other interesting/useful sites on the Joggler are:

http://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr

http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?p=87157&sid=ed063024114914ddf6e977294bcb427a

http://www.backtrack-linux.org/forums/hardware-compatibility-list/2738-o2-joggler-openpeak-open-frame-7-touch-device.html

http://www.avrfreaks.net/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=80756&view=next

The installation was pretty straight forward and uneventful but a bit long. I installed everything on the usb key, using my linux laptop. Everything was supported and worked out of the box, including the touch-screen and the wifi. I added a belkin bluetooth adaptor (which also worked out of the box) and installed skype on it. Unfortunately, the performance of skype with a bluetooth headset was below expectations. I’m also having performance issues: sometimes it’s slow, but I think this is because of my usb key being relatively slow.

It’s a great little system and for £50 I can’t fault it (I’ve paid more for photo frames!). I wish it had a few additional usb ports that I could use (instead of my ugly hub).

Also, it would be great if linux could be loaded on the device (instead of doing this on an additional external usb key).

I just had a look on the O2 site: it’s now priced at £99.99, but cheaper ones are available on ebay.

Stay tuned for more news and comments on this little gem!

One of the great things about linux is its versatility. Ironically, this is one of its problems too…

What do I mean by that? Simple. If I download a standard linux distribution with the purpose of setting up a file server, I will probably end up spending the better part of a weekend setting it up.
- Which packages should I include?
- Which should I exclude?
- How should I set up the security / firewall etc?
- Setting up samba from scratch?
- Setting up some sort of backup system?
- What about remote access?

I used to just install everything from whatever distribution I had in hand and spend a lot of time tweaking.

Turnkey Linux (http://www.turnkeylinux.org/) provides a great solution. Instead of downloading the standard ubuntu DVD, you download a small distribution that’s already customised to do exactly what you want. There are many different appliance to choose from: LAMP servers, File servers, domain controller appliance, etc etc… The images are tiny (around 100-200MB) compared to the full-blown DVD image and they are also supplied as VM images! In other words you can just download one and run it on VirtualBox or any other VM system!

Turnkey Linux appliances are based on Ubuntu, which means that there are thousands of packages you use to customise your appliance.

My file server at home is now powered by Turnkey Linux.