Catch the Magic - Santa Catcha

[seaton]

At the last meeting we had a couple of young visitors, Danny (my Step Son) and Spencer (one of the neighbours) that excitedly came away from the meeting with some ideas of capturing Santa on Camera, thus the project "Catch the Magic" was born.

To help keep the enthusiasm going, this weekend we had a bit of a hack-a-thon where I set up a couple of Rasperry Pis with monitors and keyboards running ScratchGPIO for the Kids in the street. I dug out a couple of PIR sensors , where the kids came up with a working prototype using the santa sensor they liked to call it and the stock pi camera, aka the santa camera. The scratch script continually looks for change on the PIR input pin and takes a photo - simple!

I had a couple of glitches getting scratch working with GPIO, but eventually got things running, where they happily plugged away at things. Once they had it all working we spent the next day putting it all into a fake present, where the kids drew up a cutout template for all the bits an pieces and fitted everything.

the last thing we have to do is fit some batteries into the box so it all runs unattended.

checkout the Blog Entry http://blog.strobotics.com.au/2015/10/26/catch-the-magic/ and Flickr Photo Album https://flic.kr/s/aHskjs5uXu

Stephen...

[BeJay]

Nice one! My young bloke loves scratch. I gave him a pi that we shoehorned into an old honey pot with a DC-DC converter an audio amp + speaker to run from the 12V network. He did a similar thing with a webcam using it to sense movement and take a pic. Was only 320x240 though. Worked a treat as his door guard until it became an internet radio!

I only have pics of the "development honeypot" this is in a nice case now

[seaton]

pics didn't come through BJ

[BeJay]

Bugger. Seems ok on this end

[seaton]

Is working now so not sure what was causing it.