Turning the Beaglebone into a high definition IP camera

Few weeks ago I posted some notes about using the Logitech HD Pro Webcam C920 with Gstreamer. I have since ported the setup to the Beaglebone, effectively turning my Beaglebone into a streaming IP camera that can deliver constant bitrate H.264 video at full 1920x1080p30 resolution without breaking a sweat.

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Gumstix OVero Fire and Tobi after the crash landing

The connectors on the Tobi expansion board got broken during the crash landingAs I mentioned last week, the Gumstix Overo Fire COM and the Tobi expansion board looked surprisingly well after the crash landing of the failed rocket. Yesterday, I have had a chance to take a closer look at the boards and see what damage has occurred to them. Once I separated the two boards from each other it was obvious that the 70 pin AVX connectors were damaged on both board. The electrical connections on the Gumstix Overo Fire are still OK despite the damaged connector, but the Tobi board got damaged beyond repair (PCB tracks ripped off). Below you will find some close-up photos and a video about the damaged connectors.

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Successful flight and a crash landing

Oct 3, 2010 – Danish Space Challenge (DSC) held a Rocket Festival at Borris Sønderland, Denmark, where five rockets built by German and Danish students were launched together with one of DSC’s own rockets. For the first time, the DSC rocket was flying an Arduino Duemilanove based flight computer which was responsible for releasing the parachute. This worked well. The payload in the rocket consisted of the digital video recorder built by yours truly, based on the Gumstix Overo Fire embedded Linux computer that I have been blogging about during the last few weeks, see here. Continue reading “Successful flight and a crash landing”

A few bits and pieces for the onboard video recorder

Today I have received the last pieces that we are going to need for the video recorder based on the Gumstix Overo Fire. I took the opportunity to take some pictures.

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Video recorder update

I have been quite busy since the last update trying various options for recording MJPG video using a Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 and the Gumstix Overo Fire embedded computer. The good news is that there has been significant progress reported in the following sections.

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Kernel panic, accidental downgrade and working webcam

It has been a busy night but I have made good progress with the Gumtix Overo Fire. Today’s report is action packed with kernel panics, painful downgrades and a working webcam.

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Gumstix Overo Fire booting from microSD card

I’m happy to report that I managed to make my Gumstix Overo Fire boot from the microSD card! After a few failed attempts as I mentioned here, I noticed an error message in the boot sequence:

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