Category: electronics

Is covering a 12-acre farm with WiFi a reasonable idea? If so, I could run multiple cameras, say have one on the cows and one on the pigs, all connected to a central location, On the upside, the farm is roughly square and with a mild slope to the ridge at the top. Everything is pretty much line of sight. On the downside, there’s no good central location, which would be the obvious way to service the farm with 2.4GHz WiFi. Distances are long – the field is about 250m wide/long, and I could easily pick up a 300m path length feeding from the edge.

Earlier experiments showed that I could in theory use native WiFi, using a router to receive BTFon from a broadband connection in the town over a high-gain antenna and redistributing it from a WiFi AP. The trouble is I am desperately short of power – every extra piece of kit means more frequent battery changing. In the end I went with a more powerful MiFi access point – one that supported an external WiFi aerial. I used a 9dB TP-Link patch antenna

This feed the farm from one edge, as it happens the antenna is furthest away from the most likely camera sites but slightly higher than the target sites. The signal pattern fans out quite well, serving the likely points of interest. I was chuffed with the performance of the aerial – it gives the right balance of directionality, as I don’t need to bother to serve the field behind me, but it gives very useful gain in the wanted direction – I can just about get a wifi connection with the internal antenna of my iPod touch from the opposite corner of the field. As the forest garden and some of the windbreak trees grow I may experience problems, but that is for another day. By then perhaps we have a site with mains power 🙂

For the MiFi unit I used a TP-Link MR3220 – it’s surprisingly hard to find a MiFi box with an external WiFi aerial socket, because not unreasonably they anticipate you using this sort of thing as a personal cloud. I had to live with the 9V powering and used a Chinese Ebay 12V to 9V converter switchmode converter to efficiently turn the 12V battery power to 9VDC

The other part of improving range is to upgrade the camera end with a WiFi card with an external rather than internal antenna; since the Pice case has been withdrawn I need another solution for that. The PICE case also still exposes the Raspberry Pi camera lens to the elements which is Not a Good Thing leading to the lens haziness problem.

It doesn’t really matter how big the camera is, so I took the opportunity of using a much larger box – a  Hammond case 1599 to fit it all in.

If you’re going to put something outside then the fewer holes you can drill the better, hence the use of sticky pads and cable ties as mounts, and the single 2.1mm power socket on the base, so water could drain out that way if necessary, and could be standing 0.5cm without affecting the electronics.

The case has several mounting lugs in the lid, but in the end I will have to drill a hole for the camera. I placed an O ring on the case and a microscope slide pressed down by foam and the camera to make a watertight seal but keep the elements out of the lens; that way hopefully I get to either clean or replace the microscope slide after a season is out rather than the camera.

The 12V to 5V converter is mounted in the case; that way any cable losses aren’t too bad and the current in the supply cable is reduced, it is about 200mA max.

Setting it up in the field

The paving slab is there because the first version of the tripod ended up flat on its back in the morning. At least the construction can survive a fall of 2m. Perhaps the neoprene sunshade and the extra area at the top of the pole presents too much wind loading.

Controlling the Pi

I postulated all sorts of complex feedback when first considering this, letting the Pi tell the microcontroller to turn the Pi off with a GPIO pin, but it’s been massively simplified. A microcontroller powers up the Pi, and pulls the power after 5 minutes. Then it waits 10 minutes and does it again, provided that the 12V supply is enough (>11.5V) and it is daylight.

I use similar Python code to the first cut, but this time I start running the takepic.py camera code on startup. I look for a switch closed on the GPIO, and if so, abort uploading the picture because the Pi is in service mode¹. This switch is a reed switch mounted on the inside of the case and activated by sticking a magnet to it, this saves a hole. It lets me get onto the Pi and configure it. Normally the switch is open, in which case the Pi tells the system to do a shutdown in 4 minutes, which is enough to connect, get Wifi network DHCP and SFTP the picture to the website. 5 minutes after powerup, the microcontroller managing power pulls the power from the Pi.

The shutdown command on the Pi minimizes the chance of corrupting the SD card, and the picture is written to the /run/shm/ ramdisk prior to uploading, since there is no point using up SD card write cycles with ephemeral data like that.

#!/usr/bin/python
#$Id: takepic.py 58 2014-11-06 20:54:02Z ermine $
import time
import picamera
import paramiko
import os
import socket
import datetime
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO

GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BOARD) # USE Pi BOARD pins, not the BCM ver
GPIO.setup(7, GPIO.IN, pull_up_down=GPIO.PUD_UP) # 7 is next to gnd on pin 9, so set pull up

# defs
camerafail=False;
DIR='/run/shm/'
imagename=socket.gethostname()+'.jpg'
remotename='WEBSITE.COM' # assuming this is reachable by ssh and www
try :
    with picamera.PiCamera() as camera:
        #camera.resolution = (2592, 1944)
        # The following is equivalent
        #camera.resolution = camera.MAX_IMAGE_RESOLUTION
        # run half res to test out connectivity etc and save money
        #camera.led = False
        camera.resolution = camera.MAX_IMAGE_RESOLUTION
        #camera.resolution = (1296, 972) # do half real to eliminate Bayer softness and save TX bandwidth
        camera.exposure_mode='night'
        camera.meter_mode='matrix'
        camera.start_preview()
        time.sleep(2)
        camera.capture(DIR+imagename, resize=(1296,972), format='jpeg', quality=20)
except picamera.PiCameraError,e :
    print e
    camerafail=True
finally :
        camera.close()
time.sleep(10) # hopefully nw is up by now 
if(GPIO.input(7) ==1):
    #print "will shutdown"
    os.system("/usr/bin/sudo /sbin/shutdown -h +4 &")

    if not(camerafail) :


        timedout=False
        connected=False
        counter=0

        while (not timedout) and not connected :
            try :
                s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
                s.connect((remotename,80))
                print(s.getsockname()[0])
                connected=True
            except socket.error,e :
                
                counter += 1
                print counter
            finally: 
                s.close()
            time.sleep(5)
            if counter >= 5:
                timedout=True
                print 'Failed to connect to ',remotename,' ',datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%y/%m/%d %H:%M")
        
        

         
        #upload
        if not timedout: 
            print 'ftp image starting ',datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%y/%m/%d %H:%M")
            try :
                ssh = paramiko.SSHClient()
                ssh.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())
                ssh.connect(remotename, port=2222, username='USERNAME', password='PASSWORD')
                sftp = ssh.open_sftp();
                sftp.put(DIR+imagename, '/home/DIR/'+imagename)
                sftp.close()
                print "closed SFTP"
            except paramiko.AuthenticationException,e :
                print e
            except socket.error,e :
                print e
else :
    print "manually aborted by jumper 7 to 9"

Power savings

This has massively reduced the power drain of the camera – it is < 200mA for a third of the time, with an outage during the night of about 1/3 of the time, so about 1/3 × 2/3 × 200mA average, ie ~50mA. The original power drain was about 300mA 24×7.This power drain is much less than an electric fence which is usually about 150mA, so it could be used from the fence battery, which would then let us monitor the fence battery voltage as a bonus.

It also suits solar panel charging well, as the power drain is proportional to day length. The WiFi node draws more (a sustained 200mA during the day) but at least it is just one place where the battery needs changing more often – about once every two weeks. That’s livable with, but if I’d used a WiFi long-distance connect and a WiFi high power AP that would be shortened too much, particularly as logging into BT Fon would require another Pi to keep the connection open. GiffGaff run about £7.50 per Gb PAYG which isn’t bad.

Got pigs

So far so good. The new pigcam

• works all over the likely sites on the farm
• concentrates the data through one GiffGaff SIM[ref]data service gets cheaper with volume, so this is much better than each camera having a SIM[/ref]
• reduces power at camera sites to minimal
• lets me add more than one camera to the system

which is a success compared to the single site version which had a very high power drain because it wasn’t being power-managed.