An unexpected weekend project that went very well.

We all have these unexpected projects. This week I was given a surveillance DVR that had seen better days. The primary hard disk had spun a bearing (hehe). It was a system I built a number of years ago for my family. Previously I used the software that came with the capture card, a generic 4 channel bt878 card. The software ran on Windows XP so from the start I never really expected anything long lasting although it did last about 5 years.

Anyways, enough about what it was. I dug up a 4Gb USB flash drive, installed a very basic CenOS 6 install, got x264, FFmpeg, ZoneMinder, MySQL, PHP and Apache and made it a reliable surveillance server now. It does have a 1Tb drive for the video.

I have to say the ZoneMinder software is not anything fancy by first appearance but supports all the features that most expensive commercial solutions offer. I like that it did not require me to install any GUI environment on the device itself. No resources wasted on this build.


[root@cam ~]# uptime
 11:09:56 up 1 day, 23:04,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.18, 0.22
[root@cam ~]# ps ax | grep zm[ac]
12795 ?        S      0:04 /usr/bin/perl -wT /usr/local/bin/zmaudit.pl -c
12931 ?        S     46:47 /usr/local/bin/zmc -d /dev/video0
16011 ?        S    131:08 /usr/local/bin/zma -m 5
16192 ?        S     35:39 /usr/local/bin/zmc -d /dev/video1
16204 ?        S    126:37 /usr/local/bin/zma -m 6
16231 ?        S     35:32 /usr/local/bin/zmc -d /dev/video2
16243 ?        S    120:07 /usr/local/bin/zma -m 7
16309 ?        S     34:22 /usr/local/bin/zmc -d /dev/video3
16321 ?        S    128:12 /usr/local/bin/zma -m 8


 Not bad for an old Pentium E5200 with 2Gb.

-Mathew

Newest contributer to this blog

Hello followers. I am a new edition to this blog. My topics will be far and wide due to that being the focus of my interests.

My current project is porting ArchLinux to my newest embedded device, the oDroid. I have a Raspberry Pi, I wanted something with a bit more processing capabilities and discovered the oDroid. Great device.

The status of this project is, as far as I can tell the system is running but no video output from the HDMI output (framebuffer only). I have a 1.7v UART adapter on the way so that I can get the console up and figure out the video issue.

As of last night I've completed setting up a VM on my server that is dedicated to distcc (distributed c compiler) to assist in compiling software on the oDroid. Not that the oDroid is slow but just because time is progress.

In case you've not seen the oDroid, it packs a Cortex A9 quad-core ARM7 at 1.7GHz, 2Gb memory and Mali-400 GPU. A couple other things that make this stand out compared to the RPi is that this has 6xUSB, Audio in, 8-bit eMMC memory option and then a category 10 SD reader. I did spring for the 16Gb eMMC option.

I now have the eMMC running Android on it, one SD card with my ArchLinux progress and a second SD card with Ubuntu. I did manage to get GNUradio compiled under Ubuntu and have been using it with a RTL-SDR receiver.

-Mathew