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Welcome to the raspberry-pi-camcorder wiki!
This Raspberry Pi dedicated device was developed for the University of California, Riverside Entomology Department in order to successfully capture footage of insect eggs in remote urban and agriculture environments to look for natural predators of the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug. This program has four (4) modules intended for use: a camcorder to continuously record hour-long .h264 video clips (day/night) and a time-lapse camera to continuously capture still images in 10 second-long intervals (day/night).
This wiki assumes the user is capable of accessing the Raspberry Pi environment and is intended for documentation of hardware and software components, or for use by anyone who wants to build their own Raspberry Pi camcorder system.
This system is intended to be used as a plug-and-play dedicated device. Once turned on, the Pi will start recording and save videos/images to an external USB NTFS hard drive or to /media/usbhdd if the hard drive is unavailable.
The day and night modes are configured to work in harmony with each other. Each program checks sunrise_sunset_tables.csv (a log of sunrise and sunset times from the year 2013) and turns its camera on/off accordingly. The day programs turns its camera on a half hour before sunrise and turns it off a half hour after sunset; the night programs turns its camera on a half hour before sunset and turns it off a half hour after sunrise.
If the Pi is configured to record/capture images at night, an infrared LED and a 220 Ohm 1% Resistor must be connected in series from GPIO 17 (pin #11) to ground.
- Raspberry Pi & power supply
- PiCamera(day)/NOIR PiCamera w/infrared LED & 220 Ohm 1% Resistor (night)
- RTC Clock Module by Abel Electronics
- An external USB hard drive (formatted as NTFS)
The system uses the /etc/rc.local boot script to check for internet connection, load/set the RTC module (depending if there is an internet connection), and start the appropriate camera program.
Log on to the Pi (locally or through SSH). Once the system boots, we must first locate the current camera program's process ID so we can terminate it:
ps aux | grep python
Retrieve the process ID:
TBA....