It is the next day. I was so tired yesterday. I did so much family stuff and then worked on the pondcam and blogged until 2:30AM (Again…). I have to wrap this up so I can get back to boring suburban dad life and get to bed at a regular hour.
We did a ton of stuff and today I want to test it all. But there is one problem it is dark outside. One thing we can do is check our camera.
I did another coat of the rubberized spray last night before I fell asleep. After work today, I went down and peeled back the blue painters tape and here is what it looks like.
I probably wouldn’t call that “pretty”, and it is still a little bit ugly, but much better than the frankencam hack job that was so obvious through the plexiglass.
Let’s pretty up our antenna and mount our camera. I use the much more flexible thin cable to connect the antenna and hold it down with zip ties. I bolt our camera to the bottom and we are done. Here is what it looks like in the garage.
Oh.. I have to test this, but it is dark outside. I don’t care. I bring it out by the beach and set it up. Here is a picture.
All I want to do now is test it. The access point fell overnight because the blue painters tape came free that I was holding up the antenna. I fix this and am too exited so I place it in the window any way that it will stay.
I then connect up the camera. I watch carefully as it starts up because when I drilled one of those holes it did pound the camera board a little and I wonder if it will do anything. I see the light flickering like it always has then after it totally boots up the light turns off. Here is what it looks like with the battery attached.
Looks good to me, lets go to the workshop and power up the netbook.
I am really happy now, I can totally see the wires and the grass that the camera is pointing to, but don’t want to stop testing. I want to bring the camera to the other side of the pond. We have all of these high gain antennas I just have this feeling I can get this thing going really far away. There is a pretty high berm on the other side which is the furthest away from the wireless access point I can take it on my property in the direction of the pond. It is a little hike.
I grab the camera/antenna and the battery. Now one thing you can’t tell from pictures is how scary my property is at night. There are 13 or so huge red oak trees that are like 200 years old and they are 60 feet high (maybe more), like the pondcam the oak trees are ugly and menacing looking at night. My house is a log house and right now it is pretty well lit up, but we don’t have a lot of outside lights. There is tons of wildlife our here, the biggest thing on my mind is coyotes. I know what you are thinking, “No one gets killed by coyotes. The only case was out east, we don’t have those kind here, out there they are half-wolf, here they are more like little dogs, you are a grown man you could just kick them and run.” Yes… You make perfect sense, but it is really scary and really really dark. We live a half mile from the fire station and anytime a fire truck comes out at night you hear all of the coyotes. You almost never see them, but when they hear a siren, you hear like 20 of them. And they are all over the place. Sure I can fight off one coyote… Maybe two of them, but 20? I don’t think so. And, a few feet away from where I want to place the camera my neighbor told me a couple of years ago that he saw a mom coyote with pups that would growl at him every time he would mow lawn. Let me put it this way, I don’t want to be that first dolt that gets killed by a pack of coyotes in the Midwest. Anyway… That was my fear creeping in. Pondcam is way more important than me getting eaten by coyotes so, I march on and get it all set up. I connect everything and power it up. Here is a really crappy picture of it from the beach.
See that light blue dot, that is the camera with our light turned on. Now let’s get inside and see if we can connect to it!
Nope nothing. I can’t see it. I can’t ping it. I can see that every once in a while it does come up, but it just isn’t reliable. I mess with the directional antenna and try to point it at the antenna way out there on the other side of the pond. Still nothing.
I think about it for a little while and have nothing. I am ready to just call it a night, but as usual I think a little more and get roped in to doing more. So, I decide to keep messing with things. I definitely would rather mess with something in the light than go out there with all of the coyotes. I try to think of a way to get more gain on our wireless access point in the house. I do see this in my wireless bin.
This is pretty cool. That is a “super cantenna” it is a really powerful directional antenna. I have it because when I do security assessments for my customers it may be necessary for me to try to break into a customers network from outside their office or branch office. With this connected to a notebook, I can point it at different areas of their building and try to pick up wireless signals that I can break into. You just aim it at the area you want to pick up signal and the rest is just messing with software. Right next to it is the adapter I need to connect it to our wireless access point.
I grab the access point off the windowsill and stick our “cantenna” on it. I grab a lawn chair and just point it right at our camera antenna that is all the way out on the other side of the pond, that is also running on that battery in the dark. It looks really goofy. I just plugged it right into the top with an adapter and no wire to move it around. Here is a picture.
I really don’t know if this will work. All of the hacked connections I made to connect things introduce some loss, but I have no idea how much. Also, on my way out the coyote side of the pond I bumped that antenna on the ground. I think to myself, “It did fall off the roof years and years ago, it is probably OK”. But who knows? I run inside and look at the netbook.
That is tough to make out, especially if you are not an IT guy, but it is exactly what I was hoping. The netbook can see the camera. The packets being sent by that ping command are now coming back just fine. And it is really low latency too. It should give me a picture. Let’s pull up the software.
That is tough to make out too, but that is grass in the front where the light is hitting. Beyond that grass is much taller grass and then the pond.
Here is a better picture I grabbed as a screen shot from my desktop before I started writing.
I am really happy with this and want to let the pondcam run like this overnight. So I did three things: I made a firewall rule on my home firewall so I can connect to the camera from the Internet tomorrow, if it is still up in the morning. I also wrote a script that runs from my workstation to send me an email if it goes down in the middle of the night. I really want to do this test because I need to know how long that battery will run the camera for without solar power charging it. But I will share what time it went down at night if it does go down. I brought the camera out there at about 9:15PM. It is now 11:32PM. It has been on this whole time. I wonder if it will go all night.
I was so excited about this I brought the netbook upstairs and dragged my wife into looking out the kitchen window past the pond and having her watch me turn on and off the light from the netbook (My wife is not technical at all and probably only read the first paragraph of post 1 and then stopped). I was sure to tell her, it doesn’t matter where I am in the world I can look through the camera and turn on and off that light. She looked solidly unimpressed, but did say, “I think our kids will end up smart because you are interested in this stuff.” My gosh if that is not the green light to continue my project what is?
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So it is the next day. 7:30PM. I didn’t see any emails so I assume the camera is still up and working. I try to connect to it and can’t. I check my test script that I wrote and it looks like it didn’t work correctly (I thought I tested that last night, but apparently there was something wrong with it). I worked all day at a customer site, so didn’t even get a chance to look at it from a remote connection. I did know that it was working this morning. So a full charge will most likely run the camera all night. I doubt that the solar panels can fully charge those batteries and run the camera in one day, but who knows unless we test. I moved the camera back by the beach and connected the solar panels to the battery, then the battery to the camera. Looks like I have nothing to do until tomorrow. I will be excited to check if it is on when the sun comes up.
Oh… Crap… I just checked the weather. It is going to rain tomorrow. I don’t even know if the camera will actually turn on at this point. The solar panels have to do two things:
1) Charge the batteries.
2) Have enough juice left over to turn on the camera.
It didn’t turn on in the “low light” of dusk. Dang… I can’t wait to check it tomorrow to see if it turns on. I really don’t think it will though. It just seems like it will be too much for those solar panels in rain and probably clouds.
One word: coyotecam!