Yoicks ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

motioneye. I run docker image ccrisan/motioneye:master-armhf.

It's not as good as iSpy on motion detection over a garden with grass, hedge and plants. I suspect that is due to the rpi4 arm cpu being underpowered. However, maybe it is like KODI if you get a bespoke OS build it may work better.

All pretty straightforward... one of these

The built-in IR illuminators have a range of 3-4 metres.

It's been outdoors for a few weeks now, including some heavy rain, and the waterproofing is holding OK up so far.

That's quite good as it as the lens is not behind the same cover as the LEDs, so doesn't suffer from back scatter.

I tried putting a Pi Zero and IR cut cameras with side LED illuminators in a clear fronted weatherproof box, but all you got was glare. I removed them and am now using a separate 12V IR illuminator, which you can get in a verity of sizes (both power and coverage angle) to suit your needs.

---druck

I have only one Pi (3B+) currently working and it has only one job, running a Radius server for my home network. Eventually I'll likely move that to my new router, once I get it configured.

Another Pi (3B) I have used to connect an old USB printer on my home network so it ran CUPS and Samba. It never worked well but with my printing needs it was good enough and I didn't want to fiddle with it. This worked until recently, now the Pi answers pings but won't print and I can't connect to CUPS or ssh. I guess I'll autopsy it at some point.

I have only one Pi in use, an early 512Kb model B2 that I use fairly infrequently for development work.

I also have a second Pi 2B, a Zero-W and a PICO sitting on the shelf waiting for me to get a round tuit to work on the project they were bought for: a programmable timer for use on electric powered free flight model aircraft. The Pi 2B will be fitted with a TFT touch sensitive screen and used as a portable controller for the timer.

Currently I'm dithering over what I'll use to implement the timer: it could be a PICAXE M14, the Pi Zero or the PICO.

The PICAXE is easily the smallest, lightest and most power-efficient choice, but it can only be programmed in a horrid unsigned integer BASIC, though it does have built-in support for controlling RC servos,

The Zero and the PICO have big the advantage of being programmable in C. The PICO looks interesting, because should be possible to use one or two cores as dedicated servo controllers, another for communication with the Pi used as timer controller, and still have at least one other core to run the timer's main logic.

Or assembler, one presumes.

Trying to port standard C to an 8 bit micro is a horrid task. BTDTGTTS on an 6809.

Half the time it didnt accept my syntax, and the other time it generated code so big doing everything in 16 bit integers, that it wasn't very efficient

IIRC Arduinos were moderately favoured for RC usage

I'm not sure about that, but I get the strong impression assembler isn't supported by the PICAXE organisation. As you may have gathered from the name, the thing is basically a tarted-up PIC mpu in a plastic DIP package. Its servo support is quite nice: just write a servo position code to the 'servo port' and the pin emits the standard RC servo wave form: a 1-2mS pulse every 20 mS, the pulse length encoding the servo position.

I'm uncertain whether there's any custom hardware involved: documentation doesn't say. All I know is that the BASIC source is compiled, linked with a binary support package (customised to match whatever PICAXE chip you're using), the resulting binary blob is uploaded into the PICAXE device and started.

Said compiler is meant to be run on X86 kit, but there's also a third party X86 emulator (a qemu derivative) that lets you run the PICAXE Basic compiler on an RPi.

There are reasonable C compilers for the 6809 - running under FLEX09 or OS-9 operating systems, but I thought they were rather slow, since compiler section was loaded from floppy and run in sequence. They're also quite old - at least the ones I tried used pre-ANSI C syntax.

Graham Trott's PL/9 (a port of PL/M to 8809 FLEX systems), because it was very much faster than any C compiler I saw. It combined the editor, compiler, and debugger as a single integrated package that would easily compile surprisingly large PL/9 source modules on a 48K system.

I have several scattered around in different offices at work, hooked up to a light-up button and the network. If a client starts acting unruly or threatening, pressing the button will summon someone from security.

It's a hardware replacement for software that did the same on people's computers by pressing a button three times. One important difference is that it works when the computer is locked.

In hindsight, the task at hand is simple enough that it could probably be handled by an Arduino with an Ethernet shield. (PoE would be nice, too, to eliminate the power cable and wall wart.) On the other hand, it's simple enough that one page of Python code is all that the Raspberry Pi needs.

_/_ / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail) (IIGS(

At least the script is somewhat human-parsable, so that if you can figure out what it's doing, you stand a chance at modifying it to do what you really need it to do.

Worse still are the YouTube videos that just click around in some point-and-drool frontend, often with some annoying EDM or (c)rap "music" playing in the background. Even if point-and-drool is all you know, a list of instructions (even if it's little more than "click here, then click there") would get the point across more succinctly. You could even throw in a few screenshots if you must.

(I suspect there's no monetization opportunity in there, however.)

_/_ / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail) (IIGS(

cc65 is a reasonably useful cross-compiler for the 6502 that has been used for several decently-sized projects. It targets all of the 6502-based systems you've heard of (Apple, Commodore, Atari, Nintendo), and others that maybe you haven't. Last I checked it doesn't produce 65816 code, but ORCA/C is a native compiler option for the Apple IIGS that does (and I've heard that this was used to cross-compile for the SNES back in the day)...and it's somewhat out of scope for a discussion of 8-bit compilers. :)

_/_ / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail) (IIGS(

Didn't the compiler support other types/sizes of variable, such as signed or unsigned char? Or the bits that are standard (I believe) in C?

But, being a 6809 (my favourite of that generation), I guess the compiler was rather crude.

David

On the occasions I've looked at this sort of stuff, the major problem is that it relies on a library, and all the interesting stuff is in the library rather than the script.

David

Think what I used was Introl cross running on a PDP/11 with Unix...

I have looked into this as a bit of curiosity. C exists for PIC CPUs, although possibly not the pickaxe..

And the API calls are not documented well, if at all.

Ah, but you have forgotten implicit casts. bytes turned into ints to be compared ISTR.

It was. we used to inspect the assembler and gasp in horror, and rewrite the tricky bits in assembler.

They should boot headless without the monitor setting, (although there may have been issues with early Pi 4B firmware), but if you connect a monitor after boot it will be in a low resolution mode, or show no display at all. So it is a good idea to put in the setting for the monitor you may have to connect when you are diagnosing any issues.

---druck

Not really, there are 4 form factors A, B, Zero and Compute, and different numbered generations. Tweaks to a generation get a plus sign.

---druck

You would benefit enormously from a Pi 4B. While the Pi 3B+ can run a desktop at just about an acceptable speed, it soon hits a wall when the

---druck

Not sure RISC OS can use any memory over 1 GB, though; wasn't that a limitation? And compared to the full multi user Linux desktop it's a very simple system and thus fast; I don't know whether you would notice any speed difference between the Pi 3 and 4 (certainly with some tasks but not general use, I think).