OWFSPlug : 1-Wire File System + Motion Detection Software in a NAND Package

Its taken me a week or so, but I've nearly got it completed... all in NAND flash... all built with Buildroot...

• 1-Wire File System : Also known as OWFS, it allows one to seamlessly attach and monitor Dallas/Maxim sensors and instruments, such as temperature, humidity, count/quantity, air pressure, windspeed, etc. One can also write it to an LCD.
• Temploggerd : A simple daemon that polls OWFS data and formats it to publish on an interactive web page.
• Motion : Records images from a (web)cam, examines them for changes, and detects motion. Very configurable and customizable, can be controlled remotely via a separate webpage.
• lighttpd : serve up the data and images from the items above.

The current setup has www in /tmp so that things can be collected without messing w/ the UBIFS partition - with an option for periodically syncing the contents to a backup dir/site.

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• davy's Github Repo's rescue-dg

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/01/2013 08:39PM by davygravy.

That's really sweet! I look forward to your completed write up.

right now I'm putting some extra stuff in for time-lapse recording ... ffmpeg has been notoriously API-unstable over the years, and so motion has stuck w/ an older version of ffmpeg (as a build requirement) that will no longer builld on Buildroot, so I've found an indirect way around that - and included the most recent h.264 underpinnings that produce a high quality timelapse movie. Will post the source when done.

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• davy's Github Repo's rescue-dg

I finally got around to committing this to git, and now hosted on github.com

https://github.com/davygravy/owfsplug

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• davy's Github Repo's rescue-dg

Thanks for this. Any chance you could provide a tarball, or point me to a guide for compiling from git?

@bitz: I will try to post a tarball ASAP.

Be aware that what I post would be bootable, but would need some editting to set up things like where you want to stop the images, how you'd want to process them with the embedded ffmpeg (which is built into the image).

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• davy's Github Repo's rescue-dg

davygravy Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> @bitz: I will try to post a tarball ASAP.
>
> Be aware that what I post would be bootable, but
> would need some editting to set up things like
> where you want to stop the images, how you'd want
> to process them with the embedded ffmpeg (which is
> built into the image).

Thanks, I am looking forward to it. Setting up motion should be no problem

kk, bitz. I've uploaded an old tarball here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1015928/Kirkwood/OWFSplug/OWFSplug-rootfs.tar ... mind you, this may be "roughly hewn" but should be bootable on a USB stick.

I'm currently tidying up my git repo, adding in some needed items and culling out the cruft...

https://github.com/davygravy/owfsplug

The README shows the basics....

Will post a NAND image when I'm satisfied w/ it. If you are interest and know git, you can propose commits via Github.

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• davy's Github Repo's rescue-dg

Much thanks, I can't wait to play around with this. I wold be useless at helping with git, but have several dockstars, pogos, a goflex and some pi's to play with if you needed any testing done. I have been looking at your weather station the last few days and convincing myself that it would be a fun project to set one up, so this will definitely see some use.

Something to note... the tarball I posted is USB rootfs only... I'm doing some final touches now on what I've got in git, and if it boots and functions correctly, I'll build UBIFS and kernel bins for flashing.

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• davy's Github Repo's rescue-dg

good to know

OK, this is pretty much finished now. A lot closer to working out of the box.

The rootfs.tar tarball is for a USB pendrive. Once booted, that rootfs is a working OWFSplug system, but also it has the img files for flashing it to NAND. AFAIK, the only adjustments needed would be to set up the device IDs of the 1-Wire sensors, change (if necessary) the motion-usbcamera-modules in /etc ... ? Maybe the timezone in /etc/TZ.

Works without or with an attached USB drive, but I suggest using a USB drive, as /tmp will fill up quickly w/ images, movies and rrdb database files.

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• davy's Github Repo's rescue-dg

OK, finally had some time to sit down and flash it to one of my plugs, up and running. Tomorrow hopefully I will have time to tweak motion a little, and research some 1-wire devices to get a little weather station going. Finally have motion running on a dock that will survive a power outage! Thank you sir, great work!

IIRC Maxim IC has some sort of offer where they'll send you a limited grab bag of sensors

I got enough sensors to play with for free.

The usb adaptor can be had for $10 or so if you watch ebay.

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• davy's Github Repo's rescue-dg

Looks like Maxim is no longer producing the lightning detector, can be had from hobby-boards, but Maxim still does sample requests, so I can at least get temp and humidity sensors to play with. Thanks for suggesting, I have requested samples from them before when I was trying to teach myself electronics, and forgot that they did that.

So far everything is going well on my plug. Had some issues mounting my Samba share for the images at first, fstab wouldn't read from a credentials file, or wait for the network to come up, I even started pulling from git to try and add samba hoping something in smbcient would fix it but went with an if-up.d script instead (at least now I know how to pull from git, and that buildroot stuff is pretty cool, I wonder what the space restraints on mtd1 are for adding packages).

I decided that I wanted to add a wifi stick to my plug while waiting for my sensors to come in. Looks like I will have to add the necessary tools to the image with buildroot, and make a driver for my realtek rtl8188cus module. So I started by grabbing the source for the drivers from realtek.com and added some lines for the dockstar

CONFIG_PLATFORM_ARM_926T = y

and

ifeq ($(CONFIG_PLATFORM_ARM_926T),y)
EXTRA_CFLAGS += -DCONFIG_LITTLE_ENDIAN
ARCH := arm
CROSS_COMPILE := /tmp/owfsplug/output/host/usr/bin/arm-unknown-linux-uclibcgneabi
KVER := 3.2.7
KSRC := /tmp/owfsplug/output/build/buildroot-config
endif

and I get the errors

make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/owfsplug/output/build/buildroot-config'
make[1]: *** No rule to make target `modules'.  Stop.
make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/owfsplug/output/build/buildroot-config'
make: *** [modules] Error 2

I really think I may be out of my league here, but I would appreciate some guidance if you had any.

Figured it out, spent a week reading up on using make, buildroot, and compiling the realtek drivers, most of my help came from the ArmadeuS Project wiki here had to make a new image with things like wpa_supplicant and wireless tools, add some driver modules to the kernel, and make a few changes to the config, then I could compile the wireless driver. My little dockstar is currently residing in a weatherproof camera enclosure outside my barn, connected to wifi, and recording motion to an old spare ide SSD I had sitting around. I never received my Maxim boards, so I'm going to order some more "samples", but so far I couldn't be happier, thanks for all the great work!