{"id":599,"date":"2014-07-07T21:58:02","date_gmt":"2014-07-07T21:58:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oaktreelabs.co.uk\/blog\/?p=599"},"modified":"2014-11-06T19:46:39","modified_gmt":"2014-11-06T19:46:39","slug":"remote-farm-camera-experimenting-with-wifi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.richardmudhar.com\/blog\/2014\/07\/remote-farm-camera-experimenting-with-wifi\/","title":{"rendered":"Remote Farm camera – experimenting with WiFi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clive from the Raspberry Pi Foundation very kindly let us have a Pi Model A and camera, so it’s time to take this project forward a stage. At the moment the alpha test version is in service keeping an eye on our new piglets. Although the original purpose was to keep an eye on our newly arrived cattle<\/a> pigs are more enterprising, so it’s good to know where they are<\/p>\n

\"Our<\/a>
Our camera on the pigs<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Development was stalled however since it’s not easy to work on a piece of kit in service.\u00a0 Ideally one MiFi box could serve a number of cameras. This would reduce the camera power drain and consolidate.<\/p>\n

The trouble is that the site is on the edge of town, a couple of hundred metres from the nearest houses, and I want to use BT Wi-Fi<\/p>\n

\"Yagi<\/a>
Yagi wifi antenna<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I acquired one of these from ebay I didn’t have much hope for the integrity of the device, and to gain height I needed to go 250m further way from any likely source of WiFi. But it worked a treat, as a WISP client, I’m amazed. I was able to see 18 access points, five of which were BT WiFi , 3 of which were 5dB or above. The TP-Link gives a decent link at more than 5 and nothing at 2. I streamed a video to confirm the stability of the link.<\/p>\n

\"TP<\/a>
TP Link signal strength with yagi<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I use it with a TP-Link TL-WA5110G which has the advantage of having a sma antenna socket and a native power supply of 12V. Although the adaptor is specced at 1A I measured the power drain at about 210 mA (~2.5W @12V). Which isn’t great but not terrible<\/p>\n

A WISP client is not a\u00a0 repeater<\/h4>\n

The trouble with using the tP link as a WISP client is the signal is presented as Ethernet, and I’d then want to re-radiate the signal on a different Wi-Fi network.\u00a0 I could set it as a repeater, but then every Raspberry Pi would have the hurt of logging into BT WiFi. Whereas if I use a Raspberry Pi connected via ethernet to the TP-link and a WiPi dongle to connect to the farm I can collect pictures from the cameras on the farm network and perhaps power-manage the TP Link to only update every so often.<\/p>\n

So an unexpected win, and I can look at using a Model B as a concentrator<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clive from the Raspberry Pi Foundation very kindly let us have a Pi Model A and camera, so it’s time to take this project forward a stage. At the moment the alpha test version is in service keeping an eye on our new piglets. Although the original purpose was to keep an eye on our … Continue reading “Remote Farm camera – experimenting with WiFi”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[57,275,10,13,14],"tags":[284],"class_list":["post-599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electronics","category-greenmantle","category-raspberry-pi","category-sensors","category-smallholding","tag-pigcam"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5aOO7-9F","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.richardmudhar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.richardmudhar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.richardmudhar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.richardmudhar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.richardmudhar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=599"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.richardmudhar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1416,"href":"https:\/\/www.richardmudhar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599\/revisions\/1416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.richardmudhar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.richardmudhar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.richardmudhar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}