Category Archives: Mini Computers

Motorising my camera slider – The electronics

April 8, 2018 John Aldred Leave a comment

In Part 1 of this little adventure, I spoke about the 3D printed parts I created to motorise my camera slider. I plan to make a few revisions to those printed parts in the future, but for now, they’re functional, so I’m leaving them alone for the minute. Now, it’s time to move onto the electronics side of things.

My plan is to power the whole setup using 3 cell LiPo RC batteries. I have a bunch of these from a drone I no longer use, so I figure I should do something with them instead of leaving them to rot.

But I can’t just hook a stepper motor straight into a battery and magically expect it to work. I need other items, too. And that’s where this post comes in.

Continue reading Motorising my camera slider – The electronics →

Linux, Mini Computers

Moving Linux to Smaller SD Cards

February 19, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

SD cards are pretty cheap these days, but that doesn’t mean we should let our smaller ones go to waste, especially when a system doesn’t fully utilise the space of a larger one that could be more useful elsewhere.

So, what can we do?

Normally, to backup and restore SD cards, I use Win32 Disk Imager.

The main problem of Win32 Disk Imager is that it creates an image file the same size as your SD card, no matter how much of the card is actually being used. If you’re using a 32GB card with a 4GB partition and the rest is unallocated space it will still create a 32GB image file.

Typically, however, I think most of us will allocate the full size of the SD card to the system.

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CubieTruck, Linux, Photography, TTSOL

Eye-Fi on Linux Part 2

January 31, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

When the Eye-Fi works so well with the iPad, why would I want to seemingly make life more complicated for myself by adding more hardware into the mix?

Well, transferring to a Linux based machine like the CubieTruck offers me some advantages over the iPad. Some of them I alluded to in my previous post on this topic, but at the time, my primary thought was really just on-site backup (after making the switch from SanDisk Eye-Fi cards to Eye-Fi Pro X2 cards).

No real interaction, no file serving to viewing devices, just straight up copy the images to the CubieTruck, and then copy it all onto my network when I get back home.

Continue reading Eye-Fi on Linux Part 2 →

Linux, Mini Computers, Photography

Eye-Fi on Linux

January 18, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

My current WiFi situation on Location works for me at the moment.

As I shoot, a couple of seconds after hitting the shutter, the images come up on my iPad screen. I can immediately see which images have hit their focus and are nice and sharp without unwanted motion blur.

I can get a better overall view of the scene on the iPad so I don’t have to spend hours fixing something in Photoshop that I missed on the tiny LCD on the back of the camera. I can just see it and fix on set before taking another shot.

As I’m planning to turn the CubieTruck into a portable backup storage device for use on location, I thought “What if I could transmit via WiFi to the Cubie (or Raspberry Pi) instead of the iPad?”

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CubieTruck, Linux

The CubieTruck has Landed

January 15, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

So, I’m now officially a Trucker. A CubieTrucker, that is.

It arrived yesterday, sadly about half an hour before I had to go out, so I pretty much just had chance to put the case together (almost), and didn’t really get to play with it properly at all.

But, it’s beautiful, look at it!

Continue reading The CubieTruck has Landed →

Linux, Raspberry Pi

The Joy of rPlay (or not)

January 14, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

This is a bit of a mini follow up to my recent post on AirPlay (I’ll be doing a longer one once I’ve got everything running the way I hope it will – Edit: never mind, scroll down to the bottom).

After discovering Reflector, and having a good play with it, I started to wonder if there were any Linux AirPlay clients out there.

It took some digging, but it turns out, there are! Well, there’s at least one. rPlay.

Continue reading The Joy of rPlay (or not) →

CubieBoard, CubieTruck, Linux, Raspberry Pi, Windows

BitTorrent Sync – Making Your Own Cloud

January 8, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

I’ve been using DropBox for probably about 3 years now, and it’s rather good. Overall, I’ve been quite impressed. It’s reliable, fairly quick (bandwidth permitting), and fantastic for delivering work to clients and models.

Delivery of final work to clients and models I’ve shot with has been pretty much my sole reason for using DropBox, and it will probably remain that way, at least for the foreseeable future.

I don’t need masses and masses of space for that, but I’ve still never really been all that keen on the idea of keeping things online in “the cloud” (which is basically just a fancy new term for the same old servers we’ve always had) as a form of file backup.

After recently having had a pretty major crash on one of my machines (motherboard died, taking the processor, RAM and a 2TB hard drive along with it), I’ve rebuilt and started looking into other potential backup solutions.

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Mini Computers

LS20031 GPS Module

January 7, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

GPS is something I’ve wanted to play with for a long time, but the cost of GPS modules has always put them way out of reach for just for the sake of having a new toy to play with.

At the moment, however, the good folks over at Cool Components are running a January clearance sale, and this is one of the products in that sale.

There are a couple of other GPS modules included in the sale, but with a massive reduction from £50 to £12, ordering the LS20031 GPS module (10Hz version) was really no choice at all.

I haven’t actually used my Arduino for a good few months, and I don’t think I’ve even reinstalled the software since I rebuilt my main PC a couple of months ago, but I think it’s time to pull the Uno out of its box and start having a play.

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CubieBoard, Linux

Taking a Stab at Cross Compiling

January 6, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

Cross compiling is something I’ve never really had a need to do before. All of my past Linux machines have been your standard 32Bit or 64Bit x86 based PCs, and have been fast enough that I’ve been able to compile on the machine it’ll be running on.

But, if a 15 hour XBMC compile taught me anything (other than the fact that XBMC doesn’t work fantastically on the CubieBoard), it’s that I need to setup a decent Linux box, and learn to cross compile for ARM based hardware.

I’ve also always wanted to create my own Linux setup from scratch for a long time. The CubieBoard gives me the opportunity to do this, but it will require some cross compiling to get things started.

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CubieBoard, Linux

Let’s Try Cubie Web Server

December 31, 2013 John Aldred Leave a comment

With XBMC on the CubieBoard a bust. It’s time to go back to my original thought, which is to set it up as a web server.

While I will generally run this without a monitor connected, I have decided to restore from the backup that already has LXDE installed.

Yes, I could set it up without X, and just install it in the event that I actually come around to needing it, but I figured I might as well just have it installed now. It’s not like there’s a lack of space on an 8GB MicroSD card.

Continue reading Let’s Try Cubie Web Server →

Photographer / Writer / Geek