Birdbox cam odds and ends

Unfortunately, although I did get a few visitors, including Wrens to the Birdbox, none of them decided to setup a nest.

However, I did make a few changes to make life simpler for me. First off, using an old router made life harder than necessary when transferring files or viewing the video output. I played with setting up a network bridge but this proved to be too problematic.
The simple solution was to buy a Wi-Fi Range extender with an Ethernet port. This allowed me to seamlessly add the Pi on the Power over Ethernet to my main home network.


Next, the image processing code used by the motion detection requires the camera output to a device on /dev/video0

This is not setup automatically so to setup the driver enter the following:

sudo modprobe bcm2835-v4l2

To do this automatically after every boot, add the following two lines to the end of the /etc/modules file.

# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with "#" are ignored.
# Parameters can be specified after the module name.

snd-bcm2835

# v4l2 driver for Rasberry Pi Cam
bcm2835-v4l2

To copy files between the pi and laptop. I used scp

tar -cvf images.tar *.jpg
scp images.tar username@destination.ip:images.tar
tar -xvf images.tar

And finally, to measure the temperature of CPU. Interesting both in the cold winter nights and hot summer days

/opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp