Sensor update

For those of you who may doubt my follow-through on my projects, I have not forgotten about the sensor installation project.  Because the humidity sensor requires some extra supporting circuitry, I had to order some additional components (i.e. 555 ICs, various resistors, etc).  I just received them the other day an hope to start printing the circuits soon.

In the mean time I've been working on the Raspberry Pi end of this project.  To make the RBPi fullfill my vision for the beehive sensor array, I will want to eventually make it: 1) be remotely accessible through a secure interface, 2) be wirelessly connected to my router, and 3) make it solar powered.  Thus far, I've reformatted my RBPi twice: once with Pidora and the second time with Wheezy.  Pidora, which is based on Fedora, was nice, but it doesn't seem to be as well developed as the Wheezy interface, which is Debian.  My specific problem with Pidora is that I couldn't find gnome-panel and gnome-forgotthenameof to get vncviewer working, couldn't find ffmpeg, and couldn't find a wireless RT5370 driver.  I'm sure that someone with a little more talent and perseverance could find or adapt the necessary rpms, but I haven't had many good experiences with that approach.  Anyway, none  of these seemed to be available in the RB Pi compatible repos.  With Wheezy, I've been able get the wireless driver (objective #2) and ffmpeg installed and I'm currently working on vnc.  Hopefully I'll be done with this soon as the weather is too nice now to be stuck inside staring at a computer. 

For the first objective, I've pretty much gotten the secure remote access setup by, first establishing a ssh connection through my router via:

 ssh -L 5901:localhost:5901 RBPiusername@myIP

- fyi my external IP address frequently changes so, I'll periodically have to update it using: curl smart-ip.net/myip

After I enter the user password for my RBPi, I have direct access to the machine's virtual terminal.  Once I get a vnc interface installed on the RBPi, I should then be able to check #1 off my list of my objectives. 

 As a part of this project, I also want to have a video camera in the hive.  For the camera I have an small Logitech external usb webcam that I bought about five years ago.  I no longer use it (my laptop now has one embedded), so I removed the outer covering to see what my options are for integration with the computer.  Since RBPi comes with two usb drives and there didn't seem to be any simpler connection method available, it will be easiest to just connect the webcam via usb.  However, I did find that optics did have the option for physically adjusting the focal range.  Testing it out, I found that I could adjust a very sharp focus from a few centimeters out to infinity.  I will no doubt use this feature to make adjustments when I install the camera. 

As I finish this entry, I'm currently trying to install "cheese," which is a package designed to operate most webcams.  Will update when I have more to report.