Although I have had a Raspberry Pi rev B for several weeks now, it wasn’t until last night that I got a chance to try it out. Since several people have reported failed attempts at getting the Funcube Dongle Pro and Pro+ play nicely with the Raspberry Pi, I decided to take it as far as I could in those few hours. The result is this very brief tech note about how to make the Funcube Dongle Pro and Pro+ work on the Raspberry Pi.
computer
eCAM32 camera mounted on the Overo
A few closeup photos showing the eCAM32 3.2 megapixel camera mounted on top of the Gumstix Overo Water, mounted on the Tobi expansion board.
Gumstix Overo Water + eCAM32 camera demo
As promised in my last post, here is a quick demo of the eCAM32 3.2 megapixel camera connected to the Gumstix Overo Water. I am presenting two videos, one showing the setup where the eCAM32 camera board is mounted on top of the Gumstix Overo Water, the other one being a screen cast demonstrating some of the most common settings of the camera. I am using the Tobi expansion board because it has Ethernet interface allowing me to stream H.264 encoded video to a host PC running linux.
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.
Arduino flight computer
In this video Esben Rugbjerg is demonstrating his Arduino-based flight computer. The flight computer is controlling the igniter for parachute deployment during the descent. After the computer is armed it waits until it registers a large acceleration that corresponds to the launch. After 12 seconds it fires the igniter.
Arduino flight computer
In this video Esben Rugbjerg is demonstrating his Arduino-based flight computer. The flight computer is controlling the igniter for parachute deployment during the descent. After the computer is armed it waits until it registers a large acceleration that corresponds to the launch. After 12 seconds it fires the igniter.
Rocket integration
Wednesday evening the Logitech Webcam Pro 9000 UVC camera and the Gumstix Overo Fire based video recorder have been integrated into the rocket. I will not have access to them before the launch day on Sunday. Shown below is the camera and video recorder integrated into the rocket.
Pre-flight mockup
Wednesday, the Gumstix Overo Fire-based video recorder was finally assembled and wired as it would go on the rocket.
Expected video quality during the rocket flight
We will be using the Logitech Webcam Pro 9000 for the flight, streaming MJPG video in 640×480 at 30 fps. Although the camera can stream even 1280×720 at 30 fps the USB interface on the Gumstix Overo Fire can not keep up with the required data rate. So here is a test video recorded as … Read more
Disabling the WiFi on the Gumstix Overo Fire
During the weekend I had some time to look at how to disable the combined WiFi and Bluetooth module on the Gumstix Overo Fire. The power source for the onboard video recorder consists of two 1 Ah LiPo batteries and although I did not have any measurement of the power consumption I knew this should be enough for at least one hour even with WiFi and Bluetooth switched ON during the flight (the wall plug adapter is 5V 1A). Still, I wanted to try to disable the WiFi and Bluetooth module since they are not needed during the flight.