(usb) Webcam Connected To Pineapple?

[Razzlerock]

Here is another potential idea. The scene; Your pineapple is in a public place for *testing purposes* and creates a SSH tunnel back to your home device (running Backtrack or whatever). It would be cool if you could plug a USB webcam into the pineapples and view the physical area where the pineapple is positioned (the video traffic is sent over the SSH tunnel to your home device). I know bandwidth would be a potential problem for video and therefore requires further investigation, but technically could a usb webcam be connected to the pineapple? I'm thinking that the pineapple is not powerful enough but would like confirmation.

I was thinking about something like this (not this exact model, because the system requiremnts are too high for this mode, but a type of small webcam);

http://usb.brando.com/usb-mini-web-cam-ii_p01135c043d015.html

If it WAS possible, it would be very cool

Razzlerock

Edited June 13, 2012 by Razzlerock

[Anton]

Here is another potential idea. The scene; Your pineapple is in a public place for *testing purposes* and creates a SSH tunnel back to your home device (running Backtrack or whatever). It would be cool if you could plug a USB webcam into the pineapples and view the physical area where the pineapple is positioned (the video traffic is sent over the SSH tunnel to your home device). I know bandwidth would be a potential problem for video and therefore requires further investigation, but technically could a usb webcam be connected to the pineapple? I'm thinking that the pineapple is not powerful enough but would like confirmation.

I was thinking about something like this (not this exact model, because the system requiremnts are too high for this mode, but a type of small webcam);

http://usb.brando.com/usb-mini-web-cam-ii_p01135c043d015.html

If it WAS possible, it would be very cool

Razzlerock

Hey man i was thinking about this as well, an easy solution that i came up with after pondering over it for a bit was to buy a cheap android phone with a camera on it and mount it inside the housing that your pineapple is in, use the phones wifi or 3g and the ustream.tv android app to broad cast the video from the phones camera over the net, it works a treat! + the phone has a battery so u wouldn't need to worry about it draining your pineapple's psu i.e. usb battery.

Hope this helps, - Anton.

P.s. you can find android phones that are used or have cracked screens pretty cheap, you only need to use the screen to start the app before "deploying the pineapple" your other option is a raspberry pi and a usb webcam, this will drain your psu though and you will need to creat scripts for it so that when the pi boots up the webcam is stated automatically, you will also need to some how make it connect to wifi, probably 3g is you best bet there again. I would go down the android route though, all far more compact and power friendly.

[redhook]

An Android phone that is broadcasting video will drain its battery fairly quick.

[Anton]

An Android phone that is broadcasting video will drain its battery fairly quick.

Well it all depends on how long he is going to setup his pineapple i suppose, my phone is good for 2 - 3 hours broadcasting video over wifi with the screen off. What he could do is buy a cheap usb battery just for the phone that way he will have the phones battery and the usb one. Add a solar panel to the mix and it all should be good id say with a setup like that you would get close to 5hrs or something? this all depends on the phone i guess, he can also downclock the cpu speed on the phone if it is possible and save even more power.

- Anton

[billius]

i recommend looking at usb over IP solutions. it'd make your life a lot easier, though you wouldn't have the option to compress the data. perhaps even just have the pineapple take a snapshot every now and then, encode it in a jpeg and send it to you/scp it to a VPS?

[Anton]

i recommend looking at usb over IP solutions. it'd make your life a lot easier, though you wouldn't have the option to compress the data. perhaps even just have the pineapple take a snapshot every now and then, encode it in a jpeg and send it to you/scp it to a VPS?

That's a good idea! never thought of that

[Whistle Master]

I also though that the challenge would be interesting :) BUT... USB Video Support requires kernel packages (such as kmod-video-uvc) which cannot be installed directly but need to be put directly in the firmware...

Seb, any thoughts ?

Edited June 13, 2012 by Whistle Master

[Razzlerock]

Good to hear the various inputs, sounds like I'm not the only one interested in this.

Seb, what do you think?

[barry99705]

Why not just stick an ip camera in there as well?

[Anton]

Check out this bad boy, tiny wireless ip cam, wireless live video!!! might just pick one of these up, really easy solution.

Edit: A bit to pricey for me, going to try and find a cheap alternative, gr8 for any one who has the cash. Could probably jimmy rig it up to run of a psu.

Also just another idea, you could get a normal ip cam, connect it to Ethernet port, power it using psu & pipe it out via 3g!

Edited June 14, 2012 by Anton

[Razzlerock]

The openwrt forums seem to support the use of directly connected webcams as long as the appropriate drivers, etc are shown the love.

http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/webcam

From some brief reading, looks like the 'Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000' (which can be picked up for <$50) is supported on OpenWRT;

https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=17529

I guess the question I keep asking myself (no I haven't had time to test) is will the pineapple mark 4 have enough processing power for the webcam.....

It would be so cool, if we could develop a webcam module, where the video stream could be viewed from inside the pineapple GUI.

Razzlerock

[Razzlerock]

I also though that the challenge would be interesting :) BUT... USB Video Support requires kernel packages (such as kmod-video-uvc) which cannot be installed directly but need to be put directly in the firmware...

Seb, any thoughts ?

Why can't the kernel packages (such as kmod-video-uvc) be installed directly to the pineapple?

[Whistle Master]

Give it a try and you will understand :)

opkg update && opkg install kmod-video-uvc

It gives a dependency error. I asked Seb for another thing, and he told me that it has to be built into the firmware.

[blu3nowh3r3]

seriously look into a GoPro Hero2 with the WiFi Backpack. you could also have it drawing power from a USB hub, then having a system that affects the pineapple minimalistic-ally.

[Anton]

seriously look into a GoPro Hero2 with the WiFi Backpack. you could also have it drawing power from a USB hub, then having a system that affects the pineapple minimalistic-ally.

£160 a little too price for me lol