The day I had been waiting for is finally here! My challenge kit has arrived. I was feeling a bit nostalgic and thinking about all of those claymation TV shows of my youth, so I decided to make my own. Without further ado:

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[Pi IoT] Hangar Central #3 -- Unboxing the Challenge Kit

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Sidebar: The Time Lapse Video

I tried to produce the video using only the Raspberry Pi, but that turned out to be way too much effort (and distraction). In the end I decided to use the tools I had available or those that I was most familiar with. I shot a number of still images with my Canon G10. The images were humongous at 4416x3312 pixels for a whopping 5MB. I copied the images to a shared directory on my linux/Windows7 machine. Using imagemagick under linux I then resized them to a manageable 800x600 which resulted in an average filesize of 115KB. To stitch together a time lapse video, I used ffmpeg, again under linux.

sudo apt-get install imagemagick
cd ~/Unwrap
mkdir 800x600
ls -1 *.JPG | awk '{print "convert -resize 800x " $1 " 800x600/" $1}' | sh -v
cd 800x600
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
ffmpeg -r 3 -i IMG_%*.JPG -c:v libx264 -vf "fps=25,format=yuv420p" out.mp4

Once I had the video with the time effect that I wanted, I switched over to my Windows7 machine. I used Applian Replay Music to record the audio track from YouTube. I then used Microsoft Movie Maker to add the title and credit frames and, ultimately, the soundtrack. I know that Movie Maker can also make a video from a bunch of stills, but I was having a tough time getting the timing even across all of the frames. Changes to the video proved problematic as well because it seemed as though frame timing would change or revert back to the default settings. Alas, I digress.

 

In the end, I am pleased with my cheesy little video and hope that you find some enjoyment from it as well. Don't worry I (probably) won't use this presentation format after this blog post!

The "Central" In Hangar Central

The Challengers Kit came with so many fun components that it is my goal to use all of them during the course of this project. The figurative central hub, Hangar Central, will be built using:

Setup Raspberry Pi 3 and LCD Touchscreen

And keeping with this weeks "claymation" theme...

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A couple of notes in regards to wiring up the units:

• The power supply can apparently be hooked up to either the RPi or the display as the jumpers between 5V and GND provide a common path between the two.
• Before connecting the ribbon cable, gently pull or slide out the white tab on the RPi. This is a tension release which makes inserting the cable a stress free affair. After the cable is in, gently press the cable frame back in and the cable will be held snuggly in place.

I was hoping to put together the central unit using only the components included in the kit. I might have been able to do it except for the fact that Raspian doesn't have an onscreen keyboard, so although I was able to get the machine up and running without any external parts, I still had to connect a keyboard to install the on screen matchbox-keyboard.

# Install the virtual keyboard
sudo apt-get install matchbox-keyboard

# After installing the keyboard, reboot. 
# It should appear on the desktop in Menu->Accessories->Keyboard

After installing matchbox-keyboard, I still did not have a menu option for it. If that is the case for you, simply go into Menu->Preferences->Main Menu Editor->Applications->Accessories. Enable the keyboard by clicking its' "Show" option.

Status Update

At this point I have the Raspberry Pi 3 running Raspian with a minimal display. The next step will be to get the central hub configured with a user interface that we can use for testing. Stay tuned...