Despite my hectic schedule, I seem to have required to add this to the list ... rather much higher than I wanted.
Tenting
For most of my life we went camping in tents.
In the early days, my mother had made small pup tents with a fly over the top, and these proved excellent in all sorts of weather.
After getting a driving licence I ended up in the van movement, so sleeping wasn't a tent affair, and it worked out great while there was two (or three) of us.
About 20+ years ago with an extra on the way, the van and small pup tent wasn't going to cut it, so we purchased a large family tent.
This sort of worked when we had a van, and I could pack it and the 'essentials' under the rear area, and we tented rather lightly.
When the van went, we ended up using a trailer, and surprisingly (not) more stuff keep coming with us.
This has worked, but the problem is that you need to pack it, then unpack it, and when you've finished pack it again and the worst is unpack when you get home.
Someone suggested hiring a caravan, but that didn't resolve the pack/unpack and simply meant extra cost and the hassle of booking it, etc.
We decided to purchase a caravan so that the packing and unpacking is eliminated.
Rear View
One of the issues with caravans is rearward view.
Many of the tow vehicles have an extension mirror, so they can see any cars behind, and it sort of works.
Because we haven't exactly sorted which car will do the towing, I thought about a wireless camera, and simply use a cheap tablet/phone to see what is behind.
This also gives the added benefit of being able to see when reversing it into the caravan park or back home.
Rather than go and buy something, I decided to use a RaspberryPi and a camera.
Power isn't an issue, as it is already fitted with a 12v battery and 12v lighting, but I could have used a power brick or gell cell.
I elected to use a TPlink wireless Router mainly to use the RPi for other things, and I can more easily secure it.
You could use a WiPi or any other USB wifi dongle if you wanted.
Internet
Google is a wonderful thing and I quickly found several links that demonstrated how to set up a streaming video that delivered to a browser.
The first obstacle was the delay or lag.
The lag while a car is following is fine, but for reversing I decided that it's something to avoid.
The second thing was quality ... being able to note the registration number of the idiot behind you could be useful.
I finally arrived at this site Linux Projects - Documentation
They use UV4L which allows a wide range of options and features.
Having installed it on a Pi2 and trying it with a video playing on the computer and over the ethernet connection the lag is minimal.
The configuration for this is
By my back of the envelope calculation 30 fps is about one every 33mS, so I might be two or three frames behind.
I have some more tweaking to do.
I certainly don't need HD, and a slight improvement to quality (it may be upscaling so I need to check the driver).
My first tweak to reduce the size to 1024x768 at 24 fps results in the stream simply stopping on a frame .... which is not very useful at the critical time.
Installation
As I said at the introduction, I have enough already without adding more jobs, so it might be a quick dirty install.
I do have a cupboard with power, but I don't want to hack holes, so the inital install may not be permanent.
At that point flipping the image will be necessary as the camera mount makes it upside down, but the software allows for this option.
I also need a clean start/stop as we will later use the RPi as a media server.
The current thought is a couple of buttons hanging off the GPIO for shutdown and server stop.
I'm sure this could be used by others, and when the project is tidied I'll get someone to fork it into the RPi section.
In the meantime ... here it is.
Mark
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