The ZeroCam NoIR is a tiny camera for the Raspberry Pi Zero that does not have an infrared filter. This kind of camera is more suitable for recording in low light compared to a regular camera. Because of that, it is ideal for recording wildlife in the night time. Or as part of a home security system. Furthermore, it can record even in complete darkness, with the help of an infrared lamp.
If you want to get an all-in-one bundle, check out this camera kit that combines infrared LEDs with a fisheye lens:
First, in order to use the ZeroCam, you need to enable the camera interface of the Raspberry Pi. To do that, type in a terminal:
sudo raspi-config
Next, the menu below appear. In there, select option 5 – ‘Interfacing Options’:
Then select the first option to enable the camera interface:
Raspbian already has some libraries to enable you to use the camera module. To capture a picture and save it as image.jpg:
raspistill -o image.jpg
To take a 10 seconds video and save it to video.h264 file:
raspivid -o video.h264 -t 10000
For full documentation of the camera module, see the official guide.
Here is an example of how this camera works in normal light. The plant pots are originally blue. However, with a NoIR camera, the colors are a bit desaturated:
Finally, below it’s the same picture. Only this time it’s in complete darkness, illuminated by an infrared LED. Additionally, I used the exposure setting, and set it to ‘night’.
If you don’t have a Raspberry Pi Zero, but a Raspberry Pi 2 or 3, you can still connect the ZeroCam. For that you need an adapter. In my future posts, I will show how to use this camera to create a streaming server and to create security system with a PIR sensor.
Connect the HC-SR04 to Orange Pi
The HC-SR04 is a cheap and easy to use sensor, used to measure distance with ultrasound. It can be used in many projects where you trigger an action based on an object or person entering an area, like an “alarm”, as I showed in my previous post. Also, you often see this sensor as part of more interesting projects such as robots, like this one.
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Configure the Kodi app
In this post we will learn how to develop a Kodi add-on in Python. You can run the add-on in OpenELEC or LibreELEC on the Orange Pi or Raspberry Pi, or as a matter of fact on any device that can run Kodi. The add-on will read data from various sources, such as an API for the current Bitcoin price, and show it on the main screen.
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Install OpenCV on the Orange Pi
In this project I will show you how to capture images from a webcam, detect faces in those images, train a face recognition model and then try it out on video stream from a webcam. The code here can be the basis for many other projects that contain any element of personal authentication.
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Set up the personal cloud service
One cool and practical project you can do on an Orange Pi or a Raspberry Pi is to set up a free, personal and “on-premise” version of Dropbox. This will allow you, among other things, to share files between your different devices. Additionally, you can automatically upload any new pictures from your phone to the cloud storage. In this tutorial you will learn to install the private cloud server software, configure it and sync files from a mobile device. I tested these steps on the Orange Pi and I assume this will also work on the Raspberry Pi. We will store the data on and external device, like a USB flash drive or external HDD, connected to the Orange Pi.
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In my previous IoT project on the Orange Pi I showed how to read a DHT22 or a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor. That project involved connecting the sensor to the GPIO pins and writing C code to read the sensor. In this example I will show you how do the same, but using Python code instead.
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