JohnCat – JCs Site

Building a Bee Cam – Where do I start?

My son’s school have a large bee project going on, it started a couple of years ago and they now have a website in place, some hives and a big interest from the kids as well as a the mandatory twitter account @broomleybees.

When the project first started I made the mistake of mentioning I’d just built a raspberry pi powered camera for guinea pigs to Jilly who has been behind this great project. Obviously, as any good project manager would do she hasn’t let me forget my offer of getting involved. The challenge has been finding time but we’re finally there, so what are we trying to do? Well here it is: Continue reading “Building a Bee Cam – Where do I start?”

A Simple Halloween Project

It’s halloween soon so I thought I’d try and create a really simple halloween project that anyone with a raspberry pi and a couple of simple components can implement, obviously this can be expanded upon massively but it’s a good starter and possibly the simplest script I’ve written. Continue reading “A Simple Halloween Project”

Building an aquaponics controller: part 1

I run a code club at my local middle school, Ovingham. The school are building an aquaponics system, they have built the hardware but would like to automate the control of the system, this series of blog posts will take you through my attempts to automate this. Continue reading “Building an aquaponics controller: part 1”

Time-lapse photography using the Raspberry Pi Camera

This is my first project using my Raspberry Pi camera, we had a need to monitor our new Guinea Pigs and while my girlfriend was away I thought I’d use the Raspberry Pi camera to do this. The project provides the following functionality:

Take a photo every x seconds
Collate photos into a timelapse video
upload the video to you-tube

Additional functions I added whilst I developed the system were:

Generate the video if the memory becomes full to enable further monitoring
Add a light sensor so that pictures of the dark are not taken, this would also allow the processing to be done during downtime (if the memory card is large enough)
Add a switch to enable the program to end cleanly Continue reading “Time-lapse photography using the Raspberry Pi Camera”

Remote Access To Your RPi

In my professional life I am often working away from home, one of the things I like to do is remotely access my Rapberry Pi, or even my Mac to work on personal projects. For a while I have just been accessing the resources using some dynamic DNS hosts but I keep forgetting the URLs they provide. This post provides details on how to configure your network and domain name to provide an easy to remember url for accessing resources in your network. Continue reading “Remote Access To Your RPi”

Creating custom Siri Behaviour

Now that we’ve got Siri up and running on the RPi I want to start integarting it. Unfortunately I’m waiting for a GPIO connector so I thought I’d play with Siri itself to get a feel for the SiriProxy functionality. Continue reading “Creating custom Siri Behaviour”

Setting Up SiriProxy on RPi

This entry talks through the steps required to create a SiriProxy on your RPi that will enable you to trap custom Siri commands made on an iPhone and then perform a custom action using the RPi, which I’ll cover in a later entry.
Continue reading “Setting Up SiriProxy on RPi”

Raspberry Pi – Stage 2 – Networking Remoting (Mac)

As I have limited display devices (TVs) in the home and there is always a battle with the kids the first thing I wanted to do with the RPi was set it up wirelessly and configure remote access through both command line and a screen viewer. This entry provides the step by step guidance to do this. Continue reading “Raspberry Pi – Stage 2 – Networking Remoting (Mac)”

Raspberry Pi – Stage 1 – Setting up the RPi (Mac)

So the Raspberry Pi finally arrived from Santa on Christmas day, it’s taken me until now to get around to doing anything with it. I’ve a lot of ideas on what to do, I just need to decide on one. However the first step is to get it set up, and this is what this entry focuses on. Continue reading “Raspberry Pi – Stage 1 – Setting up the RPi (Mac)”

Mapping iPhone location in Windows

Today I saw an article published by the Guardian on a discovery that the Apple iPhone stores location data locally and has done since iOS4, the article can be found here. The article includes a link to some open source Mac software to view your movements, unfortunately “I’m a PC” so I wondered how I could extract the same data and plot it on a map, and it was actually fairly easy, although I didn’t go for the animations or time based stuff of where I was when.
Continue reading “Mapping iPhone location in Windows”