Argh! It was so obvious

Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 21st March, 2007 @ 23:23

In lieu of a proper follow-up to my entry about the time lapse camera project I've been working on, I thought I'd share a little revelation I had tonight. The project's been a complete nightmare, and that mostly because of the awful Silex USB Device Servers we've been using. In wireless mode they're ridiculously flakey and even wired they're a pain to work with.

So one of the things learned for the future was not to use them again. So my plan became put a mini-ITX motherboard in an outdoor box (which we've now done for our Linksys central access point) and place one with each camera, so control of the camera is handled locally rather than centrally. That's a little complicated and expensive, but should be a pretty reliable solution.

But it seems like overkill, by quite a long way! I was playing with my old Buffalo wireless router last night, which has OpenWRT installed, to make a wireless bridge to replace that part of the dodgy USB servers. The thought occurred tonight that something like that would be ideal, if only it had a USB port! Then I remembered this. D'oh! I've even found mention of gphoto running on it to grab pictures from PTP cameras. I wish I'd remembered it this time last week or even better, two weeks ago. We'd have ended up with a much healthier profit!