Remote viewing of fusor in realtime with raspi/cam
Posted: Thu Nov 06, 2014 7:43 pm
I need to be able to remotely view the fusor without getting the rads I was getting. Especially now that we've made a major breakthrough - I don't want to die for a 30 second look in there. So I've been exploring various ways to get far away and still see what's going on in there (along with the rest of the remote control junk required).
The inverse square law is your friend...when you're up into the milliwatts of output, as we are now. It's easier to move me to another building on campus than the fusor, so that's what's about to happen.
http://youtu.be/IkEud_IuBLY
For this, I used a pi B+ (they are really nicer...) built into a custom box with a real power supply and short wires (low 5v is the bane of pi's and I'm using a lot for things here), Adafruit's 320x240 LCD (it's cool but...needs a little tweaking), wifi, a wireless keyboard and mouse (another trick, they all use 2.4 ghz), the standard Pi camera with extra IR block filter I added that still isn't quite enough, silvmanchior's web streamer for the camera...and a few custom tweaks and mods to make these normally incompatible pieces of code work together. I can even SSH into the pi now, use it's basic login terminal, run X windows and LXDE if I like (with tweaks so all the windows don't go outside the tiny display), use the touchscreen as a rather crummy mouse, and so forth. This is pretty high resolution, almost 3k pixels/dimension, and has BY FAR the lowest latency over the ethernet of anything I've tried - for example, using VLC to stream a webcam over the LAN and then using mplayer (which for whatever reason plays back with less latency than VLC for this) does use less bandwidth than the Pi solution. But I don't care on gigE, I do care about the extra second or two delay, since I am using this to monitor something fairly dangerous to life and budget. I don't need a solution that shows me it blew up 2 seconds ago...I need NOW.
I'll be adding posts to this thread as I remember and dupe this (it's too cool to only have one, after all). For one thing, raspi-update, required for the web streaming, breaks the LCD display code...and so on - LX terminal is far too large for the little screen and I found the trick to make it right, all that kind of detail you'll need when you make one - and you want to - these are truly cool.
The inverse square law is your friend...when you're up into the milliwatts of output, as we are now. It's easier to move me to another building on campus than the fusor, so that's what's about to happen.
http://youtu.be/IkEud_IuBLY
For this, I used a pi B+ (they are really nicer...) built into a custom box with a real power supply and short wires (low 5v is the bane of pi's and I'm using a lot for things here), Adafruit's 320x240 LCD (it's cool but...needs a little tweaking), wifi, a wireless keyboard and mouse (another trick, they all use 2.4 ghz), the standard Pi camera with extra IR block filter I added that still isn't quite enough, silvmanchior's web streamer for the camera...and a few custom tweaks and mods to make these normally incompatible pieces of code work together. I can even SSH into the pi now, use it's basic login terminal, run X windows and LXDE if I like (with tweaks so all the windows don't go outside the tiny display), use the touchscreen as a rather crummy mouse, and so forth. This is pretty high resolution, almost 3k pixels/dimension, and has BY FAR the lowest latency over the ethernet of anything I've tried - for example, using VLC to stream a webcam over the LAN and then using mplayer (which for whatever reason plays back with less latency than VLC for this) does use less bandwidth than the Pi solution. But I don't care on gigE, I do care about the extra second or two delay, since I am using this to monitor something fairly dangerous to life and budget. I don't need a solution that shows me it blew up 2 seconds ago...I need NOW.
I'll be adding posts to this thread as I remember and dupe this (it's too cool to only have one, after all). For one thing, raspi-update, required for the web streaming, breaks the LCD display code...and so on - LX terminal is far too large for the little screen and I found the trick to make it right, all that kind of detail you'll need when you make one - and you want to - these are truly cool.