Today I found myself in a situation where I needed the latest Gstreamer 1.4.3 on a Beaglebone running a console image by Robert C. Nelson based on Debian Wheezy. Debian Wheezy comes with the old Gstreamer 0.10 and as far as I could tell the new gstreamer isn’t even available through backports. It is however available in Debian Jessie (testing).
Hardware Lab
Hardware experiments by Alexandru Csete OZ9AEC.
The Beaglebone White, DVI-D with Audio cape and official Debian images
A lot has happened since the original Beaglebone White and the original DVI-D with Audio cape have been released. The Ångstrom distribution has been ditched and Robert C. Nelson produces Debian-based images and kernel updates at an impressive pace. Clearly, the primary focus is on the Beaglebone Black and while compatibility with Beaglebone White is also maintained, some of the capes are no longer supported, probably because they are not compatible with the Beaglebone Black.
Cubieboard as Funcube-1 telemetry receiver
Following up on my not too successful first contact with the Cubieboard, I have decided to try it one more time. It has been annoying me to have a computer board lying on the shelf not doing anything and since I wanted to migrate my Linux-based Funcube telemetry decoder from a PC to a single board computer this was an excellent opportunity / excuse to try the Cubieboard again.
First contact with the Cubieboard
I got myself a Cubieboard some months ago, not because I needed one by because I had the opportunity to join a group purchase organized by some friends back then. I wasn’t looking for a new board, however, the Cubieboard looked interesting because of the onboard SATA connector. Plus the analog audio input / output on the board may also prove useful for SDR and digital voice experiments.
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.
Beaglebone booting linux in less than 5 seconds
As I was trying to find my way around building Ångstrom using OpenEmbedded, I stumbled upon as minimalistic systemd-image recipe for the Beaglebone. It boots up a usable system in less than 5 seconds.
Arduino controlled differential pan/tilt drive
An Arduino Duemilanove controlling a differential azimuth/elevation drive. The stepper motor interface is two EasyDriver boards.
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.