hi guys!!!
been a few days again, few things have happened ;
the white widows were not coming on strong as Id hoped, not sure but ive had those seeds a while and decided to order something fresh in instead seeing as we'll timelapse it.
so I dropped some auto blueberry from dutch passion in the propagator and this time a lot better. day 3 today so they have all popped out and begin their journeys.
Im starting out with a few so can choose the best one to shoot full time later.
the pi has been Ok on the whole but annoyingly sometimes still went into crashes. im just going to have to assume its to do with fswebcam and the whole usb camera plot. in the end I have made another solution for when this happens. now an extra GPIO of the pi is toggled every minute by a CRON job. The GPIO is watched by another circuit, another little processor, MSP430 is monitoring that line. Should it stop for 7 minutes or more, it will switch its relay and close the Pi P6 header - the RESET switch. That seems to working well so on the odd occasion it does bomb out, this will recover it quickly so really we wont miss anything in the timelapse. just ride over it. the seven minutes was an estimate for a slow reboot with fsck check , so the MSP doesn't reboot it again whilst its still trying to reboot
Ah I also swapped out that tilt servo that was noisy for a new one, and shortened the length of the main cam arm a bit. that stopped any tendency to oscillate when disturbed. now the timelapse does not have the annoying vertical jitter it had earlier.
ill do some more config and sort the pots out like I want tmrw probably, start the cameras rolling for proper.
hold on folks, should have some early footage coming through in the next days