Sunrise and sunset camera controller

In order to give me some incentive to play with the low power modes, I’ve re-written the sketch originally used here…

The code is on Github here…

I’ll keep everyone posted with progress.

I updated the (messy) code, and it works (for small values of the variable “works” ).

Things that *don’t* yet work…

Sleeping till sunrise/sunset.
Setting the time/date/location using the touchscreen.
Switching something on at sunrise/sunset.

However its a start, and the sunrise/sunset times appear to agree with Google’s thoughts on the subject, within one minute, so not a bad start.

ahull wrote:[img]…[/img]

Rick Kimball wrote:ahull wrote:[img]…[/img]

I changed the display a bit, no good reason, I just wanted to play with the GFX library.

Well sunrise and sunset was too easy, I think I’ll add moon rise and moon set and moon phase next, since my 3V relay module hasn’t arrived on the slow boat yet, so I can’t actually build the camera battery control circuit yet.

Watch this space for further enlightenment.

For the record, the camera battery is going to be controlled with one of these… I was going to use a transistor and a 3V relay with a diode, but the pre-built board is around the same price as the components, and looks much neater (and has on opto-coupler thrown in for free).

Slow boat arrived, and with it 2 x 3v relay boards…. I also got my first bug report from a hackaday.io user, who pointed out that using an int for localOffset doesn’t work in India where the offset may include a half hour. Github code updated localOffset is now a float.

Now all I need is a bit of spare time to code the sleep and wake on alarm interrupt routines and play with the relay. I think I’ll use the “Ugly board” for the finished project.

The half hour offset will also be needed in South Australia
(Seems crazy to me that some places have this.. In fact i heard on the radio the other day that some people want to put South Australia on the same time zone as Sydney and Melbourne, but i doubt it will happen)

Awesome effects!! I am so pleased to know how we can use sunrise and sunset effects just as professionals. I have so much interest in photography so I am thinking to get training from the Port Macquarie Photographer.

Oscar43 wrote:Awesome effects!! I am so pleased to know how we can use sunrise and sunset effects just as professionals. I have so much interest in photography so I am thinking to get training from the Port Macquarie Photographer.

@Any, your image links are broken again …

martinayotte wrote:@Any, your image links are broken again …

Or perhaps this one.

8:30 static, image moved when ‘view image’d in iceweasel/linux

nice arc of lights center and high-lighted tower/saturn 5 to right:-)

11:00 static either way, nice green though

now i actually know what big dipper looks like

your dog is moving though:-)

stephen

Ohh its great and clips are amazing, I will surely click nature inspired images after my training.

Ooops… I broke it.. (and fixed it too ).

It seems that I have a near infinite capacity from breaking these little boards. I cant even blame electrical interference from the Aurora as it hasn’t shown up tonight. I was attempting to play with low power mode, and alarms as part of my research for this project. To cut a long story short I flashed my latest masterpiece to the board and apparently killed it stone dead. Either the USB would fail to connect as if the board was toast, or dmesg would show it had done *something* with…. usb 1-1-port2: unable to enumerate USB device , but would claim the board had zero K of flash… when I attempted to program it… not good.

Even attempting to flash with the reset button down failed to get the thing out of sulk mode, so I resorted to the big guns.

The big gun in question of course being openocd, the sonic screwdriver of the microcontroller world. Since I managed to revive the pesky little bleeder I thought I would share my work flow.

First of all you will need openocd and an ST-Link V2 device (genuine or clone).

Next I recommend you read my Wiki article here…

Work your way through to the point where you connect with telnet localhost 4444

Next hold down the RESET button on the board and with it held down, issue a

> reset halt

The board will probably not actually halt at this point, until you release the reset button.
If all goes well you will see..

target state: halted
target halted due to debug-request, current mode: Thread
xPSR: 0x01000000 pc: 0x08000c60 msp: 0x20005000

These numbers may be slightly different on different processors.

Now we need to try to erase the existing garbage in the flash and replace it with something that works.

Fire up the arduino IDE and compile something for the board that you know will work (a blink sketch or whatever). I used the 6502 emulator because I had that open in a different window.

Look in the IDE compiler window for the objcopy line near the end, something like this..

……arm-none-eabi-objcopy -O binary /tmp/build8185549224902354832.tmp/arduino_6502.cpp.elf /tmp/build8185549224902354832.tmp/arduino_6502.cpp.bin

.. there you will see the temporary .bin file created by the compiler. This is what we need to flash to the STM32F103 as a test.
Next, in the openocd window type in the instruction to flash this file to the device.

> flash write_image erase /tmp/build8185549224902354832.tmp/arduino_6502.cpp.bin 0x08000000

This will auto erase the flash (even , it seems despite the board claiming it had none) and should put your compiled sketch on the device at 0x08000000

You should see something like..

wrote 29696 bytes from file /tmp/build8185549224902354832.tmp/arduino_6502.cpp.bin in 1.674014s (17.324 KiB/s)

If so, the thing is back in the land of the living (sans bootloader of course). Now restart it.

> reset run

.. and it should re-enumerate on the USB bus. If it doesn’t appear within a few seconds, power it off and back on. Hopefully at this point, your board will be none the worse for its ordeal.

Congrats ahull, you got featured on Hackaday.com

I got an email the other day to say they were going to feature one of my projects, I thought it would be the recent one… https://hackaday.io/project/8485-magic- … ttery-pack turns out I was wrong.

Hi Andy,

I noticed your name on Hackaday as I’m on their mailing list, but I realised it was not your STM32 camera timer
Which is a shame…

RogerClark wrote:Hi Andy,

I noticed your name on Hackaday as I’m on their mailing list, but I realised it was not your STM32 camera timer
Which is a shame…

Cool

Thanks Andy.

I wonder if we will get in influx of new STM32 users

RogerClark wrote:Cool

Thanks Andy.

I wonder if we will get in influx of new STM32 users

@ahull
I did post a comment to that effect, and linked back to here in the comments, but my comment has not been approved yet. maybe they are have all gone home at HAD towers. If you look closely at the picture, you will see it is an STM board (one of these), not a pro mini. I also have the software running on a BluePill from which I have removed the power LED to save a few mA.

couldn’t see enough in first picture, second – you just made my day, really messed up pinouts though

stephen

zmemw16 wrote:@ahull
… couldn’t see enough in first picture, second – you just made my day, really messed up pinouts though
stephen

Hi Andy

An Esp8266 based version would be useful, and possibly a BLE version would be interesting.

andy,
you might want to look at Linux Journal this months issue. p34

article on bird cam, some interesting bits

stephen

zmemw16 wrote:andy,
you might want to look at Linux Journal this months issue. p34

article on bird cam, some interesting bits

stephen

Here’s the view from one of the locations I hope to place a sunrise camera… Its a little wet round here are the moment as you can see. Those lakes are new.

Normally this is open countryside, green from here to the horizon.
HINT: Right click>View Image> Zoom in for more detail.

andy,
i assume the male is purple in some way

best birds, a blue jay when way younger and in 2011 a buzzard telegraph pole hopping (6 of them honestly) as i pedalled along
a lane in Wales, couple of seagulls having a go at a buzzard until it banked and dropped its talons down.

those eggs are a really nice shade of blue. my mother was a painter, all types and knew colours.
me, just straight lines, vertical, horizontal, hence the mech eng bsc; but i do wish i could draw/sketch.

what flagged the article was the polar tilt and sunrise/sunset aspects

stephen

zmemw16 wrote:andy,
i assume the male is purple in some way

Wow ! Nice picture !

martinayotte wrote:Wow ! Nice picture !

Ah Ah ! so, you are not only carry a camera with you, but also some bags of friandises …

martinayotte wrote:Ah Ah ! so, you are not only carry a camera with you, but also some bags of friandises …