So things are going well at the moment. One of the things I am working on, besides dissertation, is a summer project. This summer the project is working with Raspberry Pi tech. I finally bought one with the Raspberry Pi 2.
One of the really cool things you can do with these is attach a number of sensors. Often times this is done with weather station instrumentation but I decided that it was finally time to launch my desktop aquarium, and I mean a real aquarium!
Although the tank is cloudy in the pic, it did clear up. I am a huge fan of African Dwarf Frogs. I wanted to be able to have an aquarium, play with sensors, and find a use for a Raspberry Pi. The Aquarium Pi has been done before, but it looked like so much fun that I had to try it. If you want more information about doing this,
check out Lauren Orsini's blog post from March 2014. The
tutorials from Adafruit also help. I am using the waterproof DS18B20 sensor from Adafruit located
here.
My froggy cam does something that Lauren's does not and that is using an old Microsoft lifecam cinema to stream the feed. The feed uses
MJPG-Streamer and
this blog by Miguel Grinberg to setup. This is called from a bash script that I have loaded at startup.
I am also using no-ip dynamic dns and some clever port forwarding (because my netgear router is stupid). In addition I have yet to fine a camera mount I like, so I made one out of legos. I will come up with a better "design" of the camera mount once I get the water sensor working.
All in all this has been a fun project, and as soon as my breadboard and wires arrive, I will get the water temperature sensor working. For now I will sit back and work on writing some of the academic papers I need to be working on, but can just look over (or look up) and watch my very peaceful and relaxing frogs.
That is when they are not fighting each other.
Froggy Cam is located here:
http://www.chriscopeland.com/frogs
