Friday, June 3, 2016

Guide Posted and More Compost Cam!

Posted a guide on how to make a SoilCam / Rhizotron! Lots of things I would love to add / edit / modify, but I think it's at a point where not posting it now would mean it never would : )

Apparently ffmpeg and avconv had a security hole in their concat command. This confused me for longer than I'd like to admit before I realized they had dropped the command in a newer release. Thankfully with mpeg.ts files you can simply cat them together and then convert.

The Compost Cam continues to run and I've captured about two weeks of data. The broken images make it a bit jarring, cleaning those out is pretty easy, but even with I still find it fascinating to watch what's happening with my food!


The jarring is a result of the scanner jamming, presumably due to too much pressure from the soil pressing in on it. Al has recommended a few modifications (enclosing it in a half cylinder), I wonder if it's pressure on the edge, or the back where a plastic linear gear rail resides that causes this? 

The scanner is mounted so the scan travels down, perhaps that orientation allows the gears to slip? 

Either way, figuring out how to make the scanner last longer and skip less would be the ideal next steps for this whole project.... 

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