IoT Farm: Blog 8 - Humble Pie Camera

The addition of the G.O.A.Ts (see blog 6) has increased my desire to have "eyes on" all over the Farmstead.  As you can see below they are quite a handful!

After I spent hours and hours setting up a G.O.A.T. wonderland of pallet shelters and climbing areas they moved out...

In fact they moved out of that entire side of the Farm and went over to the West side and moved into the Chicken Casa.  This is not quite what the Chickens think as appropriate and they have logged formal complaints to management.  They did try to take matters into their own beaks and pecked the babies a time or two.  It seems a quick head butt that launches a chicken through the air discouraged that communication path and now they resort to much complaining to the humans when in the area. 

To be fair the G.O.A.Ts are kept separate during the evening and we are in the process of making them their own G.O.A.T abode.  They have already vetoed on 2 I have built, so something larger is being planned.  To include what seems to be a key selling point:

The Chicken Casa has nesting boxes, because of course we would like our chickens to eventually lay eggs in them!  Well the mini-G.O.A.T.s seemed to believe these are actually luxurious napping rooms, perfectly sized for them.  So napping rooms will be included in the next G.O.A.T. Abode attempt.

Onward to the camera part of this blog!

Element 14 shares the greatest ideas all of the time, a couple of other members have posted some neat ideas for camera implementation that made me want to test them out.

aaroNiGHTS shared this really clean setup Noir V2 video streaming baby monitor.

While I want to use the standard camera not the Noir version I really like the case modification that allows it all to be kept together!  In fact I liked it so much I had to order another RPi3 and a case!  These came really fast as well!  I was impressed!

He has a great write up that I linked above and it is pretty straight forward.  The only additional information I have is that I used a 5/16th drill bit to make my lens hole.

John Casiello wrote up a nice piece on using Motioneye and Raspberry Pi that intrigued me enough that I wanted to use that software to test out the hardware setup from above.  I will probably play with a few other software options to see what finally flows best together but this is what I wanted to test out first.

It is a really nice write-up and I only deviated a little from it so I will show those parts here yet highly recommend everyone check out the original.

For downloading the true latest version of the software I noticed that John's link took me to an outdated version.  So I jumped over to the github MotionEyeOs page.  Where I was able to check out the latest news on the software and find the latest repository for downloads.

Instructions are pretty straight forward once you have the version you want downloaded to your system.

After using 7-zip to open the .gz file I was able to use Win32DiskImager just like in the instructions and write it over to my card.

A quick boot up with the new card in the new RPi3 with modified RPi case had me right into the software.  This is where the Humble Pi comes in to play. 

Well this was a bummer!  What could possibly have went wrong? 

1st step of troubleshooting off of Raspberrypi.org is to verify the ribbon cable is attached to the proper Camera Serial Interface (CSI) and not the Display Serial Interface (DSI).  Hint from the site, The Camera port is located near the HDMI connector.

Seems that my brain got stuck with connecting the 7" screen on previous builds and automatically slapped the camera on to that port as well. 

So quick reconnect to the correct port and all is good!

And as soon as the family realized that I had it up and working:

I will continue to play with this.  I want to move it to a better location for a wider viewing field, but for now it is in place and working like a champ!