A brand new Beaglebone Black embedded computer arrived to our apartment yesterday. I plan to use it on our GaugeCam project. I would like to say it is for work or business, but there is no money in it and stuff like this is so much fun it is pretty hard to call it work. I have talked about some of my projects over the years on this blog, but I have never really explained in any detail what it is, exactly, that I am doing. I am going to take a stab at changing that with this project. At GaugeCam, we put small cameras out in very remote places (e.g. the tidal marsh of North Carolina) to measure the height of water in streams, lakes and other bodies of water. The problem out in places like that is the lack of power and connectivity (no Wifi), so we have to get our power from solar panels connected to batteries. The problem is compounded by the fact that we need to run the cameras 24/7–the solar panels do not work at night. Until now, we have communicated the images back to our internet server where they can be seen via cell phone connection and the server can calculate how high is the water in the scene. For some locations, not even that is available so we will eventually have to figure out how to transmit the images via satellite. We have a working system that does now.
What is new is that we want to turn all the cameras in the field into web servers. To do that the cameras need to be able to calculate the height of image, form a web page and serve the web page–something, as was just mentioned that is currently being done up on the server. That is the goal. We will see if we can make it happen.
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