Democracycam

I learned a lot from the first attempt at developing this device, but so much has changed that I think it's time for a new device with a similar mission.

I've been noodling on exactly what that is, and I have a few ideas I like. Once I get some traction I'll be starting a new project and I'll post a link here.

I'm working on another project which is developing a distributed filesystem that runs under node.js.  It may be a good fit for the underpinnings of Democracycam if I can make node.js perform well on the Raspberry Pi (without severe resource consumption). 

Still in the testing phase, but I thought I'd mention it in case anyone was looking down this path.

Gave the Adafruit-designed printed camera case a try, it's very well-designed, but doesn't quite fit the hardware I have.  I'm planning to pick-up a complete set of hardware from Adafruit for two cameras so I can build some field-ready units to really test and debug the software, which should run about $300.00.

Now just to find a wealthy benefactor to underwrite the R&D ;)

Looks like Adafruit has done a lot of the work for me while I took a break from this project.  The most time-consuming bits when I started out were fighting through getting the touchscreen to work with the camera, and it looks like they've wrapped all that up in a nice set of instructions here:

http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-pitft-28-inch-r...

They also offer a board that could take the place of the one I'm using (seems to work in a similar fashion, but has the software/drivers/kernel stuff figured out for you):

http://www.adafruit.com/products/1601

Finally the O/S support for the Pi camera has improved much, so now it looks like getting it to work is simply a setup option, sweet!

Based on all this I'm going to re-cobble my hardware and put together a software stack based on what's now available.  Once that's done I'll be turning my attention to the parts of the software that are not off-the-shelf (handling the network transparently and the Forban configuration).  I may also be able to pick up a second camera worth of hardware now that I have a convenient place to buy it all...

Hardware-wise the case and battery still need to be sorted out, so there's work to do.  I also want to investigate some of the other tiny ARM platforms that have come out since I originally embarked on this project, as well as other types of devices that might participate in the network (storage-only nodes, mobile network uplinks, etc.)

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