hackspaces | Raspberry Pi

Long term, deep water, satellite connected ocean monitoring system

Conservation, hackspaces and Raspberry Pis. And sharks. How could this not be the blog of the day? Gary Fletcher of ZSL sent us this report.
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Marine Conservation Camera

ZSL have developed low cost cameras to monitor marine biodiversity in large marine protected areas (MPAs) using the $35 Raspberry Pi single board computers and standard webcams and running opensource Motion tracking software. ZSL reached out to UK hackspaces to help design the cameras and achieved unprecedented economy and features.

Why Raspberry Pi?

Traditionally it has been incredibly difficult to capture events underwater – all of the usual apparatus such as PIR/heat, infrared and ultrasonic sensors simply do not work underwater. The Raspberry Pi literally opened up a new door with its low power consumption and processing power. It allowed us to deploy a solution which really fits the bill and without it would have been very troublesome to achieve!

Hardware

Each camera was deployed on an anchored buoy. Mounted directly onto the buoys were two solar panels for charging two deep cycle 90Ah lead-acid gel batteries, the aerial, and a waterproof box containing the communications system. This was then connected to a 50m SWA cat-5 cable running down to the pressure vessel containing the camera itself.

Pressure Vessel

The cameras are designed to operate at depths between 20 and 50 meters. Rlab’s (Reading Hackspace) Ryan White suggested basing the design around a clear polycarbonate tube, with machined HDPE end caps secured by threaded rods and double o-rings. One end-cap had a threaded hole which SWA cat- 5 cable was run though, anchored to the inside and then potted. This cable runs the power and communications.

BuildBrighton’s Mike Poutney and Paul Strotten machined the endcaps on their lathe and offered some great technical advice which was very well received.

The outer pressure vessels easily survived a 100m pressure test in a hydrostatic chamber. It should go significantly deeper had the internal structure not failed at that point.

Internal Structure

Rlab’s (Reading Hackspace) Barnaby Shearer designed the internal support structure. This was laser cut from 3mm acrylic. The designs were done in 3D in OpenSCAD to check all the components fitted together, then projected into 2d for laser cutting. The acrylic was glued with tensol.

Cable waterproofing

The junction box was 3d printed and then sealed using potting compound and left to dry for some time also forming a mechanical join between the inside and the cable gland.

Communications

Attached to the buoy in a waterproof case was a Raspberry Pi to coordinate the communications. This had an Ethernet link to the Raspberry Pi in the pressure vessel. It also had a WiFi dongle running in access point mode to allow easy monitoring and reconfiguration form the research vessel. The Pi also has a serial connection to an Iridium satellite modem so it can stream pictures of the images captured.

The satellite image transfer software was specially developed by Cambridge Consultants and the equipment and satellite bandwidth for this trip was kindly sponsored by Iridium.

Electronics

Attached to the bottom Pi was an Eve board to provide the Pi a RTC and a temperature sensor. Also attached was Ciseco’s Humble Pi hosting an AVR and a mosfet to to turn the Pi off at night (and critically back on each morning). This Pi wake was developed by Miles and Matt from Ciseco, who make an amazing range of Raspberry Pi and microelectronics and are well worth a look – http://www.ciseco.co.uk/

These boards were slightly modified to handle a HackHD camera via the AVR so we could capture high definition footage as well as stills.

The boards were assembled at Nottingham Hackspace.

Camera

The camera used is the Microsoft LifeCam Cinema HD, a cost effective camera conforming to the UVC specification. The only gotcha proved to be that it seems to only respond to a few ‘magic’ exposure settings (5,10,20,39,78,156,312,625,1250,2500,5000,10000,20000), and you have to wait 100ms and reset the brightness after any exposure change.

Software

Rlab (Reading Hackspace), Gary Fletcher and Doug Snead provided a simple command line program to control the camera, and a slimmed down version of MJPEG-Streamer optimized for this camera and with some additional time stamping.

This stream then fed into Motion which starts saving the frames as JPEGs after it detects an event. The JPEGs are then rsynce’d up to the top Pi (backups are always a good thing). ImageMagick then thumbnails and montages the images for efficient sending over the (slow) satellite link.

Stereo Vision

The project did spur off onto some stereo vision development work with Doug Snead and Gary Fletcher but could not be completed in time for deployment. It was hoped that it would be possible to develop this solution as so it could automatically size the passing fish to add to our conservation data.

Image showing the accurate sizing of a fish tied to the ceiling flapping in front of an oscillating fan.

What did it Look Like

The deepest ever Pi?

At 50 meters deep – could this be the deepest Pi to date?

Where was it Deployed?

The system was tested at ZSL in London Zoo behind the scenes and then went onto to open Ocean tests in the largest marine protected area in the world, the Chagos Archipelago.

Gary Fletcher and Barnaby Shearer test the camera at ZSL London Zoo, behind the scenes

Results

Well as you can see the results speak for itself, but there is still quite a lot of development work to do but once these sentient units are complete, it will offer a low-cost monitoring system that, when deployed as a network, will greatly expand ocean areas that can be observed.

For those that would like a little further reading on the actual deployment, please have a look here on the Chagos Trust website http://chagos-trust.org/projects/latest/feb-2013-expedition/battling-heat

Acknowledgements

Gary Fletcher, Barnaby Shearer, Ryan White, Richard Ibbotson, Doug Snead, Paul Strotten, Mike Pountney, Miles Hodkinson, Matt Lloyd, Adam Markwell, Gary Fletcher Senior, Anna Fletcher, Charles Turner, Marty Morriss, David Curnick, Matthew Gollock, Heather Koldewey, Alasdair Davies, Charles and Anne Shepard, Yannick Mandarin, Ronan Roche, Reece Pitts, Richard Traherne, Marion Campbell, Jonathan Pallant, Ant Skelton.

Hackspace security system

NESIT is the New England Society of Information and Technology in Connecticut, and they have a made a security system for their hackspace that gives us terrible feelings of envy. Their old RFID door lock, powered by an Arduino, was getting old and came bundled with some problems: it didn’t allow for easy modifications to the database of users (the old setup wrote user information straight to the Arduino’s eeprom), couldn’t output video, and would have been expensive to hook up to the network; running its server all the time would have cost about $200 in electricity over a year.

Running a Pi for a year costs about $3.

So Will, one of the hackspace members, set to work getting a Pi interfacing with an RFID reader, and finding some housing for the whole setup. It had to be secure, lockable and robust: somehow he squirreled up an old outdoor telephone network box made of heavy-duty plastic, which he cleaned up, using a Dremel to modify the door of the box so it could accommodate an LCD screen originally intended for a car reversing system.

Before…

…after. Note glistening result of elbow grease application.

Guts

Will really went to town on this build. He could have stopped there, but has also made sure that the system will tweet when someone enters or leaves. It also monitors temperature, can be controlled from his phone, sends an email alert if someone tries to tamper with the case, and detects motion: if it spots someone walking past, it’ll play a short video about the hackspace.

NESIT’s put details of the build online, and have made this video of the system in action. We note that the “beep” you’re using doubles as an excellent cat-scarer, Will; I have the scratches to prove it.

Americans! Want a visit from Eben at your hackspace next week?

Eben is doing some work on the west coast of the US until Wednesday, then he’s at a loose end before flying out to NYC on Saturday morning. He’s decided he’d like to fill those two days visiting bits of the country we’ve not been to before with Raspberry Pi, so we’re looking for folks at hackspaces who might want him to drop by to give a talk on one of those days.

If you’re a member of a hackspace somewhere we’ve not passed through before – somewhere on the top and bottom edges of the country, or in the middle bits – and you’d like a visit next week, please let us know in the comments below. Internal flights haven’t been booked yet, so let us know where you are and we’ll pick a couple of towns to come and visit.

If you want to see what it’s all about, here’s a bit of video from last year’s hackspace tour of the East Coast, filmed by the Orlando Sentinel.

“Why hackspaces, Liz? What about schools?” We’ve found that every hackspace we’ve visited so far has had several enthusiastic teachers in attendance already, and it’s exactly that sort of person who can best communicate to other teachers what can be done in a classroom with a Pi. We’ve also found that there’s almost always someone from a local university CS, engineering or media department there too – we can reach a much wider audience of educators this way. These are places where parents and kids congregate; exactly the sort of crowd we like to talk to. And we don’t believe education stops at age 18: electronics hacking is for everyone. Get to it in the comments!

FamiLAB Orlando and a SNES (Super Nintendo Emulated System)

FamiLAB is a hackspace in Orlando, Florida that Eben and I had a really great time visiting back in October. It’s hidden away in an industrial unit – it’s a big space, with its own commercial-sized CNC milling machine, 3d printers, laser cutters, an in-progress replica of the Bridge from Star Trek: TNG, some traffic lights, a cherry picker and a whole bunch of computers – broadly speaking, it’s pretty close to heaven. And it’s full of some great people, who use the space to get together, eat pizza, learn things (just this week their timetable include tutorials with the Pi, with Arduino, a microcontrollers show-and-tell session, a learn-to-solder session and an intro to Scratch), and make really, really cool stuff.

Ted from Familab has made a Raspberry Pi SNES hack with a difference. We see quite a few really nice little projects where an old console is gutted, a Pi stuffed inside, and the games run on the Pi. This is a bit different. It’s not just a casemod; it’s a Super Nintendo emulated on the original hardware; and it even reads (and stores the information from) old cartridges; it can write saves to them too!

This is not a project for beginners; its scale may be a little intimidating for those new to electronics. However, Ted’s documented what he did, from planning through research and construction, in minute detail, making this project easy to emulate once you are comfortable with a soldering iron.

Hackerspace Charlotte: video from Eben’s visit

Back in October, Eben and I drove down the Eastern seaboard of the United States visiting hackspaces, conferences and universities, telling people about Raspberry Pi. One of our favourite stops was in Charlotte NC, where we had a wonderfully warm welcome, ate some great pie, and met some brilliant people. The (rather gorgeously produced) video of Eben’s talk has just been released, and I highly recommend it if you have wanted to be at one of our talks and missed us – or if you’re just curious about what this whole Raspberry Pi thing is about.

Big thanks to Amelia, Hardik, Red and all our new friends from Charlotte. We hope we can come by and see you all again soon!

Rob’s travelling again: here’s what he’s up to!

Rob’s been back in the US this week, tech-evangelising his little heart out – this time visiting Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) to give keynotes and workshops on the Raspberry Pi at their ARM Developer Day and Random Hacks of Kindness events.

Rob, who doesn’t sleep, also had a chance to visit Interlock Rochester, a nearby hackerspace, to meet local Pi enthusiasts and also run a workshop for the First Robotics club from Churchville-Chili High School. Busy times. RIT’s ARM Developer Day brought in over 300 students from RIT, the University of Rochester and Cornell, who all had a chance to play with the Pi hands-on. Many students also came to show how they had already used the Raspberry Pi as a platform for their final projects. One of the best examples we saw was a smartphone controlled tank that streamed a live video feed to the phone, and used its accelerometer to control the movement of the tank. We’ve been promised video soon. Updated, 17:45 – here’s the video!

RIT also hosted one of the global Random Hacks of Kindness events over the 1st and 2nd of December. RHoK is described as “A rapidly growing global initiative encompassing a community of over 5,500 innovators in over 30 countries making the world a better place by developing practical, open source technology solutions to respond to some of the most complex challenges facing humanity.”

Rob tells us he’s really pleased to help get involved with RHoK by helping out with Raspberry Pi-based projects. One of the projects from the Rochester event was created by Skyler Lehmkuhl and Ben Miller-Jacobson, who were trying to build a cheap software-defined radio platform with the Raspberry Pi. The system has applications in emergency communications and could provide a very useful platform for coordination in a disaster relief situation. The team used a cheap off-the-shelf TV tuner to provide the radio functionality. Rob is visiting Toronto this week and will be stopping by York University, Ryerson University, Seneca College and the University of Toronto to give talks to students. But don’t worry if you can’t make it to see him – here’s a YouTube recording of his Google Tech talk from October for those who missed him, and we’ll keep posting video as we receive it.

You can follow Rob on Twitter; let us know if you’d like a visit some time in 2013, and we’ll see what we can do!

Video from Orlando

The Orlando Sentinel shot some video with Eben when we were at FamiLAB last week. ~~(This requires a click-through because I can’t embed their video.)~~ Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda, the journalist who shot this, has very kindly sent me some embed code; apparently we can expect some accompanying text at the Orlando Sentinel later on too. It’s well worth a watch – it’s only a couple of minutes long, but it’s packed with information, and there are some brilliant Raspberry Pi projects on display. Yes, we’ll be writing about Lance’s camera mount as soon as it’s ready!

Thanks again to all at FamiLAB (and thank you, John, for the USB blinky lights, which are currently wreathed around my monitor).

An award win! And a teeny-tiny MAME cabinet from Orlando, Florida.

Before I start on the meat of this post, I have a boast to make: we won another award! We’re so excited at the way the press about Raspberry Pi has been getting recently; I got into the car we’d hired to take us home from the airport yesterday, and the driver lunged into the passenger seat and brought out a copy of Stuff Magazine to show us, with a two-page spread about things you can hack with your Raspberry Pi. Then, last night (at an event we were sadly unable to attend), we won a T3 Award for Innovation of the Year. We’re very proud, very pleased and extremely grateful to all of you who voted to get us onto the shortlist.

Back to the matter in hand. One of the nice things about this mini-tour of US hackspaces that Eben and I have just completed has been the way we’ve met some people we feel we already know well from the forums or from this blog and its comments section. Shea Silverman is one of those people; he’s had a MAME project featured here before, and he’s been helping people in our forums out with their MAME ideas too. Turns out that in real life, he’s a lovely, lovely chap. I spent a long time with Shea, coveting his newest Raspberry Pi hack: a miniature MAME cabinet which, when we saw it, was doing a very smart job of running Street Fighter II on its 2-inch display. I am still feeling terrible about the bit where I got over-enthused and started to walk across the room to show it to someone, forgetting that it was still plugged in at the wall. Happily, Shea has an awesome rugby-tackle on him (for an American). This cabinet is laser-cut using the facilities at FamiLAB, a really impressive hackspace in Orlando, Florida. This machine is running Advmame under the latest Raspbian at 900mhz; Shea will be releasing the SVG files for the cabinet itself soon (he’s planning to upgrade the screen to a 3in one for better visibility).

Shea has written a bit about the evening on his blog. I’m hoping we can return to some of the places we visited on this trip later on – we had an absolute blast on this trip, and really want to see what you all get up to over the next year with your Raspberry Pis!

Wifi radio

So here I am in the back row of an auditorium in Columbia, SC, rudely blogging away while Eben gives a talk. We’ve got about fifty people in the room here at IT-ology, around half and half students and professionals (not a bad turnout at all, considering that this is the middle of a work day).

Last night at the Charlotte Hackerspace (which, if you’re even slightly local, you should visit immediately; it’s a great space filled with some brilliant people and an intoxicating odour of 3d printing), several of the people attending brought their Raspberry Pi projects to show us. We also met a few super-enthusiastic kids, the youngest of whom was a half-naked, nine-month-old hacker. Some of the projects were unfinished; there are two synthesiser projects in particular which I’m really hoping to hear more about. Red and Pierre, please let us know how you get on as you continue work on them. I also met Contractor Wolf, his Adafruit Cobbler, a nice little battery you can use to charge a micro USB device which he found at Radioshack (his Pi runs for a couple of hours on it), and a swanky little Raspberry Pi radio.

Wolf was completely new to Linux when he came to this project, and he used the MightyOhm‘s wifi radio instructions as guidance, then built on the initial idea. He’s ended up with a headless wireless radio he can SSH into from his phone or another computer, and we thought you might like to have a look too if you’re hunting around for something new to do with your Raspberry Pi. He’s got plenty of instructions on his blog: have at it!

Roadtrip

Sorry posts are a bit sporadic this week (we’re rather neglecting Twitter too): the last couple of days have consisted mainly of driving across large bits of America, spending large amounts of quality hackspace, speaking and teaching time – and sleeping, eating, washing and all that unavoidable stuff. I got a grand total of half an hour in front of a computer yesterday, which I ended up spending on the enormous pile of email that’s building up while we’re out of the office.

Alongside the hackspace visits, we’ve also been doing teaching workshops with a group of very clever kids from the Broadcom Masters programme. You can read more about it here.

Yesterday’s visit to Hackerspace Charlotte was just brilliant – we couldn’t believe the turnout and the enthusiasm, and it was great to see some of the projects people brought along to the show and tell. We’ll have some video later of Eben’s talk (a longer version of the missing Maker Faire talk).

We’re now heading off to Columbia NC, then Charleston, for today’s two talks. More of that later!