Under the weather = Bison surveillance improvements


A zoomed-in photo taken during my previous break period.

Spent much of yesterday resting after dealing with the outcome of eating some bad chili.  It was good chili that went bad when I kept it in my lunch bag unrefrigerated for about ten hours.  

During recovery I watched James Garner in episodes of The Rockford Files on Netflix, but, eventually, I became bored enough to finish constructing a duplicate surveillance system. It is essentially the exact same system that I have working at the ranch except that, rather than being housed in a weather-proof box, it is neatly glued to a piece of plywood with each part labeled.

The science fair looking duplicate system with a Wi-Fi "dongle" in place of a mobile broadband device.  The dongle connects to my home Wi-Fi router. This system allows me to test any hardware and software modifications to the system before deploying  to the field.
To explain the duplicate system, I will need to briefly explain the deployed system, which is drawn out symbolically in the graphic below.


Basically you can divide the system into four major components: cameras, communications, main computer, and power.  The cameras consists of an array of HD webcams plugged into a powered USB hub, which is connected to the main computer.  Communications includes a mobile broadband device that is bridged to a Wi-Fi router, which is connected to the main computer.  Being connected to both the cameras and communications, the main computer processes the inputs from the cameras and then uses communications to send me relevant information.  Finally, the power system provides power to the entire system.  Why I'm using a 24 Volt battery bank instead of a 12 volt battery bank is an excellent question that I'm choosing not to answer at this point.

The result of all of this is that I am able receive near real-time updates on the condition of my bison such as the photograph below.



 For any electronic system this complex it is very important to create a replica system that can be used for testing hardware and software changes.  A good example of why this is important can be seen in my recent attempt to add a slightly different version of webcam to the system. As soon as the new camera was connected a bug in the camera driver on the main computer created an error log file that grew at the rate of more than 100,000 log entries per second.  Within minutes all disk space on the main computer was consumed and most things stopped working.  Noticing there was a problem, I connected to the main computer and began checking the scripts I had written to handle the cameras.  When I opened the script files I opened them in edit mode, which in most cases would be fine.  However, because all available disk space was being actively filled by error messages, opening a file in edit mode meant the contents of the file was deleted.  Fortunately I had copies of the now deleted scripts on a backup system image, but it was a week before I was able to return to the ranch with the backup image.  Consequently, I did not have any bison updates for the week.  

The only differences between the duplicate system and the deployed system is that the duplicate system utilizes an AC power source and also uses a Wi-Fi dongle to simulate a mobile broadband device.  Everything else is identical.  From now on all programming changes and hardware testing will first be done on the duplicate system before being ported to the deployed system. 

I hope to feel good enough to head down to the ranch later today. 

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