Arkadian.eu

I had a day off today and ended up spending most of it surfing. Here are some interesting sites I found:

The following site has a great dissection of the Logitech 9000 pro camera, one of the best hi-def webcams for Linux: LINK.

Nanonote: a tiny $99 laptop that can run linux but has very limited conectivity (no WiFi, no ethernet, no host USB). Interesting concept though.

Openmoko are the creators of the FreeRunner, a linux mobile phone, which is very hackable.

The new Arduino Uno has been released. LadyAda has a great page on it. I love the idea that an Arduino can easily be converted to a custom keyboard. Now I need to buy one of these new boards!

And, finally, Shapeways, a Dutch company specialising in custom 3D printing. Funnily enough, I found them through Ponoko.com .

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.