Video for Crackers
Now, you could consider this an article about how to set up a web cam using GNU/Linux or something... Naw... We want to write a story involving chickens. Crackers is Agatha's new GIAGD machine that she uses to put up pictures of the chickens living in her moveable chicken coop. We bought a used SE440BX-2 Motherboard, and put it in a compact case. We hooked up a Logitech QuickCam Express USB, and compiled Video For Linux into kernel 2.4.20. Here is crackers config file. Here is a kernel that uses IDE and has video and usb enabled. See the other GIAGD articles for help in creating a minimal system based on this kernel. We used the USB Quickcam Video Camera driver site at Sourceforge. There is no video device in /dev, so you have to create it:
Now, we don't want tons 'o stuff on this system. The idea is that it is a minimal system used to gather pictures, rather than a desktop system. So, we wanted a utility that merely grabs a frame from the camera. Videodog is the perfect utility for this. Now, you will need to install the JPEG libraries available on xfig here. Make sure you use the --enabled-shared option when you run ./configure, so you get libraries needed for videodog. The rest is pretty straightforward. To capture a frame:
videodog -x 352 -y 288 -w 3 -d /dev/video0 -j chickenpicture.jpg
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Here is the chicken cam:
Here is the completed system mounted in the coop:
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