Office window time-lapse

As followers of this blog will know, I’ve been experimenting with a Raspberry Pi (RPi) and one of the uses that I found for it is as a webcam server. I have plans to put a permanent webcam in the TrustIV office window in Manchester and I’ll be using a RPi to do this.

My installation is pretty straightforward:

  • Raspberry Pi
  • Logitech C270 webcam
  • Shared windows folder for storage of images

I installed the standard Raspbian operating system and connected the Pi to the Office network. Once I identified it by IP address, I connected to it via SSH. I left the RPi in “headless mode” without a keyboard, monitor or mouse attached.

I installed fswebcam software. Fswebcam is a simple webcam app. It captures images from a V4L1/V4L2 compatible device or file, averages them to reduce noise and outputs the image to PNG or JPEG formats. The resulting image can then be saved to a file, like the image below.

Webcam time-lapse

Click on the image above to see the timelapse, alternatively read on for the geeky bit…

I mounted an external shared windows folder (called nas) using these commands:

cd /mnt
sudo mkdir nas
sudo mount -t cifs -o username=<username>,password=<password> //PC/nas /mnt/nas
(instructions from the Raspberry Pi adventures blog.

Then I wrote a short script called webcam.sh  that created a folder on the NAS and saved images to that share at five-second intervals

mkdir /mnt/nas/$(date +”%Y%m%d”)
sudo fswebcam -r 640×480 -S 15 –jpeg 95 –save /mnt/nas/$(date +”%Y%m%d”)/webcam.jpg

while true
     do
     sleep5
     sudo mv /mnt/nas/$(date +”%Y%m%d”)/webcam.jpg /mnt/nas/$(date
+”%Y%m%d”)/webcam_$(date +”%m%d%Y%H%M%S”).jpg
     sudo fswebcam -r 640×480 -S 15 –jpeg 95 –save /mnt/nas/20130121/webcam.jpg
done

run using
sudo ./webcam.sh

To “stitch” the video together, I used Windows Live Movie Maker to convert the folder of images to a time-lapse video. Images were replaced every 0.05 seconds, meaning that the “action” was sped up 160x faster than real life.

If you read this far, well done. The video is now on the TrustIV blog page, click the image below to see the timelapse footage, and keep checking back there for the webcam. (When I finally get round to installing it) 🙂

Webcam time-lapse

 

 

A very happy Christmas and best wishes for 2013

This year we’ve decided to send Christmas greetings by email once more. We’re donating our card and stamp money to Porch Boxes. We hope that you like James and Katie’s Christmas pictures.

James' picture
James’ picture

 

Katie's picture

 

As well as the children’s pictures, we’ve done our usual “Elf yourself” videos.

Elf Yourself Pic - 2012
Elf Yourself Pic – 2012

Charleston style”, “80s style”, “Soul style”, “Classic”, ……..sadly no “Gangnam Style” 😉

A very happy Christmas to you all.
Love from Richard, Sarah, James and Katie xxxx

 

About me

I am an experienced IT consultant with over fourteen years of experience gained in a number of technical roles, including more than 10 years experience as an application performance tester and test manager. I specialise in a number of technical disciplines including Microsoft server operating systems and HP testing tools (LoadRunner and QTP). I am an excellent communicator with both technical and business audiences.

I left HBOS (Lloyds Banking Group) in November 2009 after six years working as a senior performance tester and test manager. During my time at HBOS, I was responsible for performance testing customer facing web-sites as well as key internal and core banking applications using LoadRunner. I managed a team responsible for the performance testing of the HBOS Faster Payments system using Iliad FasTest. This was, and remains, the most ambitious test project ever undertaken by HBOS plc. As well as training and mentoring my colleagues in the performance test team, I acted as a technical advisor on Performance Center, LoadRunner and HP Diagnostics software throughout Lloyds Banking Group.

I take an active role in the UK and worldwide testing community. As well as being co-leader of the UK HP Software user group,VIVIT, I have been invited to sit on Vivit’s Board of Directors to help develop Vivit services for members throughout Europe. I have been called to speak at UK and worldwide conferences by HP and by the British Computer Society at their SIGIST testing conferences on the subject of performance testing and “building performance test centres of excellence”.

After leaving HBOS, I created my own company “Richard Bishop IT Ltd” and worked through 2010 and early 2011 working for a client in London two days per week and remotely from home. I took on a new role at Intechnica in Manchester in May 2011. Intechnica designs, develops and tests high performance web applications, specialising in cloud application development and testing.