Raspberry Pi WebCam with 3G (Solarcam)

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Revision as of 22:47, 24 April 2018 by Heiko (talk | contribs) (→‎Tips)
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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-Stick Mobile HotSpot[1]
  • Make a nice webcam out of it :)

Shopping List

  • A Pi with camera :)
  • A mobile Hotspot (I used a Huawei E1750C). 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, in my case an 74Ah battery with one dead cell
  • Solar panel (12V, 30W eBay around 40€) NOTE: Might be to small!
  • Solar charger (f.e. "10A 12V/24V PWM solar panel regler solarpanel" @ ebay for around 15€)
  • more to come…

How To

Update your Pi to the latest Linux version

See https://www.datenreise.de/raspberry-pi-raspbian-linux-wheezy-jessie-upgrade/

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 your WiFi connection breaks regularly, see Raspberry Pi WiFi issue (Solarcam)

?


  1. Since setting up the 3G-Stick was a pain in...