Raspberry Pi

Building A Dashcam With The Raspberry Pi Zero W

Ramon Persaud — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 18:51:29 +0000

I've been playing around with the Raspberry Pi Zero W lately and having so much fun on the command line. For those uninitiated it's a tiny Arm computer running Raspbian, a derivative of Debian. It has a 1 GHz processor that had the ability to be overclocked and 512 MB of RAM, in addition to wireless g and bluetooth.

A few weeks ago I built a garage door opener with video and accessible via the net. I wanted to do something a bit different and settled on a dashcam for my brother-in-law's SUV.

I wanted the camera and Pi Zero W mounted on the dashboard and to be removed with ease. On boot it should autostart the RamDashCam (RDC) and there should also be 4 desktop scripts dashcam.sh, startdashcam.sh, stopdashcam.sh, shutdownshutdown.sh. Also create and a folder named video on the Desktop for the older video files. I also needed a way to power the RDC when there is no power to the vehicle's usb ports. Lastly I wanted it's data accessible on the local LAN when the vehicle is at home.

Here is the parts list:

Raspberry Pi Zero W kit (I got mine from Vilros.com)
Raspberry Pi official camera
Micro SD card, at least 32 gigs
A 3d printed case from thingverse.com
Portable charger, usually used to charge cell phones and tablets on the go
Command strips, it's like double sided tape that's easy to remove or velcro strips

First I flashed the SD card with Raspbian, powered it up and followed the setup menu. I also set a static IP address.

Now to the fun stuff. Lets create a service so we can start and stop RDC via systemd. Using your favorite editor, navigate to "/etc/systemd/system/" and create "dashcam.service" and add the following:

[Unit]
Description=dashcam service
After=network.target
StartLimitIntervalSec=0

[Service]
Type=forking
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=1
User=pi
WorkingDirectory=/home/pi/Desktop
ExecStart=/bin/bash /home/pi/Desktop/startdashcam.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Now that's complete lets enable the service, run the following: sudo systemctl enable dashcam

I added these scripts to start and stop RDC on the Desktop so my brother-in-law doesn't have to mess around in the menus or command line. Remember to "chmod +x" these 4 scripts.

startdashcam.sh

#!/bin/bash

# remove files older than 3 days
find /home/pi/Desktopvideo -type f -iname '*.flv' -mtime +3 -exec rm {} \;

# start dashcam service
sudo systemctl start dashcam

stopdashcam.sh

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RV Offsite Backup Update

Kyle Rankin — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 21:15:00 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

Having an offsite backup in your RV is great, and after a year of use, I've discovered some ways to make it even better.

Last year I wrote a feature-length article on the data backup system I set up for my RV (see Kyle's "DIY RV Offsite Backup and Media Server" from the June 2018 issue of LJ). If you haven't read that article yet, I recommend checking it out first so you can get details on the system. In summary, I set up a Raspberry Pi media center PC connected to a 12V television in the RV. I connected an 8TB hard drive to that system and synchronized all of my files and media so it acted as a kind of off-site backup. Finally, I set up a script that would attempt to sync over all of those files from my NAS whenever it detected that the RV was on the local network. So here, I provide an update on how that system is working and a few tweaks I've made to it since.

What Works

Overall, the media center has worked well. It's been great to have all of my media with me when I'm on a road trip, and my son appreciates having access to his favorite cartoons. Because the interface is identical to the media center we have at home, there's no learning curve—everything just works. Since the Raspberry Pi is powered off the TV in the RV, you just need to turn on the TV and everything fires up.

It's also been great knowing that I have a good backup of all of my files nearby. Should anything happen to my house or my main NAS, I know that I can just get backups from the RV. Having peace of mind about your important files is valuable, and it's nice knowing in the worst case when my NAS broke, I could just disconnect my USB drive from the RV, connect it to a local system, and be back up and running.

The WiFi booster I set up on the RV also has worked pretty well to increase the range of the Raspberry Pi (and the laptops inside the RV) when on the road. When we get to a campsite that happens to offer WiFi, I just reset the booster and set up a new access point that amplifies the campsite signal for inside the RV. On one trip, I even took it out of the RV and inside a hotel room to boost the weak signal.

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Oracle Linux on Btrfs for the Raspberry Pi

Charles Fisher — Mon, 22 Jul 2019 11:30:00 +0000

by Charles Fisher

Enterprise comes to the micro server.

Oracle Linux 7 has been released for the Raspberry Pi 3. The release packages Btrfs as the root filesystem on the UEK-branded Linux 4.14 Long Term Support (LTS) kernel. A bootable disk image with a minimal install is provided along with a standard ISO installer.

CentOS appears to support only the "Mustang" Applied Micro X-Gene for AArch64, and it provides the older AArch32 environment for all models of the Raspberry Pi. Oracle Linux is a compelling option among RPM distributions in supporting AArch64 for the Pi Model 3.

This is not to say that Oracle AArch64 Linux is without flaw, as Oracle warns that this is "a preview release and for development purposes only; Oracle suggests these not be used in production." The non-functional WiFi device is missing firmware and documentation, which Oracle admits was overlooked. No X11 graphics are included in the image, although you can install them. The eponymous database client (and server) are absent. Oracle has provided a previous example of orphaned software with its Linux for SPARC project, which was abandoned after two minor releases. There's no guarantee that this ARM version will not suffer the same fate, although Oracle has responded that "our eventual target is server class platforms". One possible hardware target is the Fujitsu A64FX, a new server processor that bundles 48 addressable AArch64 cores and 32GB of RAM on one die, asserted to be the "fastest server processor" that exists.

AArch64 on the Pi

You'll need a Raspberry Pi Model 3 to run Oracle Linux. The 3B+ is the best available device, and you should choose that over the predecessor Model 3B and all other previous models. Both Model 3 boards retain the (constraining) 1GB of RAM—a SODIMM socket would be far more practical. The newer board has a CPU that is 200MHz faster and a Gigabit-compatible Ethernet port (that is limited to 300Mbit due to the USB2 linkage that connects it). A Model A also exists, but it lacks many of the ports on the 3B. More important, the Model 3 platform introduces a 64-bit CPU.

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Downsides to Raspberry Pi Alternatives

Kyle Rankin — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 12:00:00 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

Learn about some of the risks when choosing an alternative to a Raspberry Pi for your project.

I have a lot of low-cost single-board computers (SBCs) at my house. And, I've written a number of articles for Linux Journal that discuss how I put those computers to use—whether it's controlling my beer fridge, replacing a rackmount file server, acting as a media PC connected to my TV or as an off-site backup server in my RV (plus many more). Even more recently, I wrote a "Pi-ventory" article where I tried to count up just how many of these machines I had in my home.

Although the majority of the SBCs I use are some form of Raspberry Pi, I also sometimes use Pi alternatives—SBCs that mimic the Raspberry Pi while also offering expanded features—whether that's gigabit Ethernet, faster CPUs, SATA ports, USB3 support or any number of other improvements. These boards often even mimic the Raspberry Pi by having "Pi" in their names, so you have Orange Pi and Banana Pi among others. Although Pi alternatives allow you to solve some problems better than a Raspberry Pi, and in many cases they provide hardware with better specifications for the same price, they aren't without their drawbacks. So in this article, I take a look at the downsides of going with a Pi alternative based on my personal experience.

Third-Party Support

The initial Raspberry Pi was a runaway success, and all of the subsequent models have sold incredibly well. There are only a few variants on the Raspberry Pi platform, and later hardware upgrades have done a good job at maintaining backward-compatibility where possible (in particular with overall board dimensions and placement of ports). There also have been only a few "official" Raspberry Pi peripherals through the years (the camera being the best example). When you have this many of a particular hardware device out in the world, and the primary vendor is mostly focused on the hardware itself, you have a strong market for add-ons and peripherals from third parties.

The secondary Raspberry Pi market is full of cases, peripherals and add-on hardware like USB WiFi dongles that promise to be compatible out of the box with earlier models that didn't include WiFi. Adafruit is a good example of an electronics vendor who has jumped into the Raspberry Pi secondary market with a lot of different hobbyist kits that feature the Raspberry Pi as the core computing and electronics platform. That company and others also have created custom add-on shields intended to stack on top of the Raspberry Pi and add additional features including a number of different screen options, sensors and even cellular support. There's even a company that offers a case to turn a Raspberry Pi into a small laptop.

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FOSS Project Spotlight: Daylight Linux Version 3

Hamdy Abou El Anein — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 12:00:00 +0000

by Hamdy Abou El Anein

Daylight Linux is the only official distribution for the Raspberry Pi to work with the Fluxbox interface. With Fluxbox, Daylight Linux is one of the lightest and fastest distributions for all Raspberry Pi models.

Many programs, games and system tools were developed during a long year of work in Python 3 to create version 3.

Figure 1. The System at Boot

The system works with autologin, but you also can use these login/passwords: "root"/"toor" and "Daylight"/"toor".

Figure 2. The Daylight Linux Menu

Figure 3. The Daylight Linux Desktop with System Information

Figure 4. The Daylight Linux File Manager

A live version also is available for computers. This version aims to provide Debian-based Linux with the lightness of Daylight Linux.

Daylight Linux version 3 runs on all Raspberry Pi models, and it's based on Debian Buster. Visit the official website for more information and to download.

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The Single-Board Computers Issue

Bryan Lunduke — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 16:30:00 +0000

by Bryan Lunduke

When I was a child in the 1980s, I had a computer—a very 1980s computer.

It had a hefty, rectangular, grey case made of some sort of industrial sheet metal. Two plain (but rather large), square buttons adorned the front, begging to be pressed: "Reset" and "Turbo". On the right side of the case, far in the back (nearly out of reach), sat an almost comically large, red power switch. It was the kind of lever that would look right at home in an action movie—used to cut the electricity to all of New York City.

When you "threw the switch", the PC turned on with a deeply satisfying, soul-reverberating, "ka-THUNK".

Inside, sat an Intel 286 CPU decked out with 640k of RAM, which, as some unnamed person may or may not have said, "ought to be enough for anybody". For mass storage, it had a big, double tall hard drive. The connection for this drive wasn't SATA, or SCSI, or even IDE. We're talking about an MFM connection here, baby (MFM stands for Modified Frequency Modulation). As a child, I simply assumed MFM had something to do with the fact that you could hear the hard drive spinning up from down the street.

I kid, I kid. You couldn't actually hear the hard drive—not over the roar of the fan in the power supply.

It was, to say the least, a beast—beastly in size, beastly in power usage and beastly in price.

Flash-forward [counts on fingers, gets depressed at own age, downs a pint of ice cream, resumes writing article] 35 years later. We now have single-board computers (SBCs) with no fans—heck, no moving parts whatsoever—running completely silently.

These SBCs have several hundred times (in some cases, several thousand times) the RAM. Ditto for storage. With significantly faster networking (including wireless, which wasn't even a thing on that old 286) and processing speed that, even among the slowest SBCs, is so much faster, it's almost mind-boggling.

All of this is contained within a physical size often smaller than a credit card and at a price somewhere roughly between one hamburger and...a couple more hamburgers.

These small, silent, low-power, low-cost computers have changed things. They've made general-purpose computing more affordable (and durable), bringing down costs in data centers and allowing solo makers and small companies to create computer-driven hardware projects that would have been nearly impossible to tackle in days gone by.

Here in 2019, we've even got a whole heaping helping of SBCs from which to choose: Arduino, BeagleBoard, Gumstix, ODROID, Pine64, Raspberry Pi—the list goes on and on. We are spoiled for choices.

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Weekend Reading: Raspberry Pi Projects

Carlie Fairchild — Sat, 13 Oct 2018 11:23:24 +0000

by Carlie Fairchild

The Raspberry Pi has been very popular among hobbyists and educators ever since its launch in 2011. It’s a credit-card-sized single-board computer with a Broadcom BCM 2835 SoC, 256MB to 512MB of RAM, USB ports, GPIO pins, Ethernet, HDMI out, camera header and an SD card slot. The most attractive aspects of the Raspberry Pi are its low cost of $35 and large user community following. Join us this weekend as we explore some cool Raspberry Pi projects.

Raspberry Strudel: My Raspberry Pi in Austria by Kyle Rankin: In this article, I explain how I was able to colocate a Raspberry Pi and the steps I went through to prepare it for remote management.

Raspberry Pi: the Perfect Home Server by Brian Trapp: If you've got several different computers in need of a consistent and automated backup strategy, the RPi can do that. If you have music and video you'd like to be able to access from almost any screen in the house, the RPi can make that happen too. Maybe you have a printer or two you'd like to share with everyone easily? The Raspberry Pi can fill all those needs with a minimal investment in hardware and time.

Securi-Pi: Using the Raspberry Pi as a Secure Landing Point by Bill Childers: Set up a Raspberry Pi to act as an OpenVPN endpoint, SSH endpoint and Apache server—with all these services listening on port 443 so networks with restrictive policies aren't an issue.

Real-Time Rogue Wireless Access Point Detection with the Raspberry Pi by Chris Jenks: A couple years ago, I decided to go back to school to get a Bachelor's degree. I needed to find a single credit hour to fill for graduation. That one credit hour became an independent study on using the Raspberry Pi (RPi) to create a passive real-time wireless sensor network. I share my work with you here.

Flash ROMs with a Raspberry Pi by Kyle Rankin: In this article, I describe the steps I performed to turn a regular Raspberry Pi running Raspbian into a BIOS-flashing machine.

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Two Portable DIY Retro Gaming Consoles

Kyle Rankin — Mon, 03 Sep 2018 12:33:21 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

A look at Adafruit's PiGRRL Zero vs. Hardkernel's ODROID-GO.

If you enjoy retro gaming, there are so many options, it can be tough to know what to get. The choices range from officially sanctioned systems from Nintendo all the way to homemade RetroPie projects like I've covered in Linux Journal in the past. Of course, those systems are designed to be permanently attached to a TV.

But, what if you want to play retro games on the road? Although it's true that you could just connect a gamepad to a laptop and use an emulator, there's something to be said for a console that fits in your pocket like the original Nintendo Game Boy. In this article, I describe two different portable DIY retro gaming projects I've built and compare and contrast their features.

Adafruit PiGRRL Zero

The RetroPie project spawned an incredible number of DIY retro consoles due to how easy and cheap the project made it to build a console out of the widely available and popular Raspberry Pi. Although most of the projects were aimed at home consoles, Adafruit took things a step further and created the PiGRRL project series that combines Raspberry Pis with LCD screens, buttons, batteries and other electronics into a portable RetroPie system that has a similar form factor to the original Game Boy. You buy the kit, print the case and buttons yourself with a 3D printer, and after some soldering, you have a portable console.

The original PiGRRL was based off the Raspberry Pi and was similar in size and shape to the original Game Boy. In the original kit, you also took apart an SNES gamepad, cut the electronics and used it for gamepad electronics. Although you got the benefit of a real SNES gamepad's button feedback, due to that Game Boy form factor, there were no L and R shoulder buttons, and only A and B buttons on the front, so it was aimed at NES and Game Boy games.

The PiGRRL 2 took the original PiGRRL and offered a number of upgrades. First, it was based on the faster Raspberry Pi 2, which could emulate newer systems like the SNES. It also incorporated its own custom gamepad electronics, so you could get A, B, X and Y buttons in the front, plus L and R buttons in the back, while still maintaining the similar Game Boy form factor.

Figure 1. PiGRRL 2

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DIY RV Offsite Backup and Media Server

Kyle Rankin — Tue, 10 Jul 2018 11:45:00 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

What better way to add a geeky touch to #vanlife than with a Linux server in your RV?

One easily could make the strong argument that an RV is the ultimate DIY project playground. It combines all of the DIY projects you could perform on a vehicle with the DIY projects for a home. Add to that the fact that you may spend days living in a small house on wheels navigating highways, forests and deserts, and you have a whole other class of DIY projects to make the most of that smaller space. RVs also offer a whole suite of power options from 12V deep cycle batteries to 110V shore power to generators and alternators to solar power, so there's a whole class of electrical DIY projects related to making the most of your changing power options.

And if you're a geek, having an RV introduces a whole other level of DIY possibilities. First, there are all of the electronics projects to manage switching between power sources, tracking energy consumption and keeping those batteries charged. Then there's an entire category of projects related to internet access while away from home that involve everything from mobile WiFi hotspots to cellular-boosting networks to roving satellite internet (and if you're clever, a smart router that routes you to the best and cheapest available option). Finally, there are several project possibilities related to the computer systems in the RV, including local switches and routers, personal computers that turn the RV into a mobile office, and media centers so you can watch TV and movies from the road.

It just so happens that I recently got an RV—a 1996 Roadtrek 170 to be exact. Although this purchase has spawned a huge list of DIY projects, my very first Linux-based project focuses on the media center. At home, my media center is a Raspberry Pi running OSMC, and it works great for accessing my ripped DVDs and CDs from my NAS and playing them on my living-room TV. When I got the RV, I realized that one of the first things we'd want is a way to access all of that media from the road, even if we were in the middle of the woods.

In this article, I describe all the steps I took to build a media server just for the RV that maintains an up-to-date copy of my media and even syncs up automatically when it's parked in my driveway. It turns out that in the process of building a media server, I ended up with a pretty great off-site backup solution as well. Even if you don't own an RV, you could adapt these steps to add your own semi-offsite backup to your car.

Figure 1. Introducing "Van Winkle" (Photo Credit: Joy Rankin)

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Piventory: LJ Tech Editor's Personal Stash of Raspberry Pis and Other Single-Board Computers

Kyle Rankin — Thu, 14 Jun 2018 12:00:00 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

It's like an extra-geeky episode of Cribs featuring single-board computers.

I'm a big fan of DIY projects and think that there is a lot of value in doing something yourself instead of relying on some third party. I mow my own lawn, change my own oil and do most of my own home repairs, and because of my background in system administration, you'll find all sorts of DIY servers at my house too. In the old days, geeks like me would have stacks of loud power-hungry desktop computers around and use them to learn about Linux and networking, but these days, VMs and cloud services have taken their place for most people. I still like running my own servers though, and thanks to the advent of these tiny, cheap computers like the Raspberry Pi series, I've been able to replace all of my home services with a lot of different small, cheap, low-power computers.

Occasionally, I'll hear people talk about how they have a Raspberry Pi or some other small computer lying around, but they haven't figured out quite what to do with it yet. And it always shocks me, because I have a house full of those small computers doing all sorts of things, so in this article, I describe my personal "Piventory"—an inventory of all of the little low-power computers that stay running around my house. So if you're struggling to figure out what to do with your own Raspberry Pi, maybe this article will give you some inspiration.

Primary NAS and Central Server

In "Papa's Got a Brand New NAS" I wrote about my search for a replacement for my rackmount server that acted as a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) for my house, along with a bunch of other services. Ultimately, I found that I could replace the whole thing with an ODroid XU4. Because of its octo-core ARM CPU, gigabit networking and high-speed USB3 port, I was able to move my hard drives over to a Mediasonic Probox USB3 disk array and set up a new low-power NAS that paid for itself in electricity costs.

In addition to a NAS, this server provides a number of backup services for my main server that sits in a data center. It acts as a backup mail server, authoritative DNS, and it also provides a VPN so I can connect to my home network from anywhere in the world—not bad for a little $75 ARM board.

Figure 1. Papa's New NAS

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