Raspberry Pi WebCam with 3G (Solarcam)
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The Idea
- Use solar panel to harvest energy
- Store the energy in a left over car battery
- Power a Pi, camera and
3G-StickMobile HotSpot[1] - Make a nice webcam out of it :)
Shopping List
- A Pi :)
- Huawei E1750C (thats an mobile HotSpot. Because getting an UMTS-Stick getting to work with an Pi sucks. Additionally you can easily join the WiFi network for maintenance)
- SIM Card
- (used) Car battery, my case an 74Ah battery with one dead cell
- Solar panel (TBD)
- Solar charger (TBD)
- more to come…
How To
Update your Pi to the latest Linux version
apt-get update apt-get upgrade
TBD ZBD
Scripts
Script: Take picture every minute
Add this to crontab:
* * * * * /home/pi/Development/webcam/takePicture.sh > /dev/null 2>&1
Add a file named takePicture.sh to ~/Development/webcam/ with this contents:
TBD TBD TBD
Tips
- Remember that this Pi is in the wild and easily stolen or all the data read
- Don't use your usual passwords for this project
- Don't store keys on the Pi
- Let your master server fetch the data (so no private keys are stored on the Pi) or use a chroot environment
- Create a special user to access the data from remote, or even better, get it per HTTP and use .htaccess for privacy (and less 3G-traffic ;) )
- If you WiFi connection breaks regularly, see Raspberry Pi WiFi issue (Solarcam)
?
- Links
- ↑ Since setting up the 3G-Stick was a pain in...