Code – James Batchelor

Manually install net-snmpd on Gentoo

Recently we’ve moved from an aged Opsview instance to Zabbix for our system health monitoring, which in turn facilitated moving data collector agents from Nagios to snmp.

Many of our PBX’s were deployed from the vendors ISO and so run atop of Gentoo, and it has a couple of issues:

We’ve been told not to “emerge” anything by the vendor, as the base OS on the image is not maintained.
Portage (Gentoo’s package manager) has fallen out of date, meaning even if emerge is attempted, it’ll fail as all repository links are broke.

If faced with the same issue, this is how to install net-snmpd from source, add it a startup service and be able to monitor via snmp…

Automated Timelapse: Update

Its been a year since my time-lapse post, and since my server has been working away without external input capturing and archiving the view from from my window the entire time.

Something I wanted to capture is a time-lapse of of summer and winter from the same perspective, in order to see the difference between the two polar seasons in terms of sunlight.

Now with a year’s worth of capture and as a tribute to the reliability of the code, I thought to quickly splice together a June and December time lapse video:

Its interesting to see how the webcam when left at the default settings interprets light values over a sustained period of time. As even in the summer it will get as dark as the winter night at some point, I thought of this as a natural reset point for the cam’s light values.

Choosing a similar weather conditions at both ends of the daylight spectrum (23/06 and 19/12) the camera seemingly registers a different light strength.

Anyways it is still an interesting watch regardless of the date its being viewed at, hope you enjoy, and wishing you a happy new year!

Update: Raspberry Pi Temperature Display

With the cooler outdoor temperatures, a bug in my original code for the temperature display has cropped up:

The DS18B20 returns temperatures with up to three decimal places, with the decimal point omitted, therefore a temperature of 10oC would be shown as 10000 by the sensor. To deal with this and for the display to show the temp to one decimal, I used this code:

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Automated Time-lapse Solution

A while ago I worked on a simple CCTV system for work, which involved using software to capture images every second then batch convert them to video every five minutes. It was crude but did the job.

I also dabbled in the past with time lapse videos, however this was a more manual process with images capturing to a folder, then personally loading them into Windows Movie Maker to create the video. With the tedium of creating the videos, the software I used for capturing (YAWCam) would hang after a few weeks constant running, not to mention without upkeep, the hundreds of thousands of image files populating the hard drive.

As a project it was time to combine the learnings from these and create an automated time lapse video creator, a program that would capture images, then create a 5-minute video that contains the days’ footage, and finish by deleting the temporary images to leave just the days video.

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