First light....

Last Monday we finally got first images running through RTS2. The only missing part of the image acquisition is automatic focusing. Focuser still needs testing which we will probably get to end of this week.

Our Proof

Though this is quite a milestone there is still loads of work left to do. There are several software pieces that need work before BORAT can really achieve a primitive autonomous state.

Flood Lights

So far the surveillance/security system is coming along smoothly. We finished setting up a Bluecherry BC-H16480A capture card (16 ports!) and hooked up the flood lights. They're impressively bright and can be toggled with the web switch (I need to buy one of these for home).

Now, we just need to finish writing the Arduino driver to talk to RTS2 and hook it all up to the main building's security system. We need to figure out the logic and what constitutes an alarm or just a warning, as well as calibrate the PIR sensors.

Here's a pano view of the new floodlights:

Lee was moving around, but it still turned out OK

Dome in Motion

Lee closes up the dome after we finished some testing.

Problems of 2/2/2012

Newest addition is the new server is in place. Now we have plenty of horse power, disk, and redundancy to keep things rolling. With the new server in place attention can be focused to ZoneMinder and actually working with it with out worrying the compute might hard lock.

Software

• Focus driver needs a little tweaking and testing - READY FOR PHYSICAL TEST
  
• Add user friendly GUI to control primitive features of the system - Website in progress - PARTIALLY COMPLETE
• TESTING and LOADS of it
• Nagios setup to point to new devices- BORAT online, other devices still need work
• Udev rules added to BORAT
  

Hardware

• Motion sensor wiring done, just need to connect each sensor via breadboard/connectors
• Weather sensor needs calibration
• New cable end for dome control cable
• Fan controller and Focuser in single box with single power supply
• Cable rewire/Cable management, hellish mess right now
  

Security

• ZM also needs to be finished setting up - IN PROGRESS
  
• ZM notification needs to be solved - Have a plan (stmp-cli for emal notifications)
  
• Motion detectors need to be wired in and fully tested
• Need some minor integration with IR+ZM+Lights work in combination
• Motion detection system needs some arduino code