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Axis uses this method to present video from their camera. It works in netscape (and Mozilla) and in IE for mac, but not in IE for Windows.

The 2120 looks like it's almost what you need. It can talk to a modem for incoming or outgoing calls, it can take a picture based on either time or alarm (push a button to take a picture).

But its power is 12VAC, 9.6A. You'll have to tinker to give it AC.

The 2120 looks like it's almost what you need. It can talk to a modem for incoming or outgoing calls, it can take a picture based on either time or alarm (push a button to take a picture).

But its power is 12VAC, 9.6A. You'll have to tinker to give it AC.

A local retailer pointed me to this fixed webcam the other day:

http://www.axis.com/products/cam_2120/index.htm

It's motion sensitive, and has it's own webserver built in, and attaches to the network instead of a PC, either that or it can dial up a modem for you! :)
And the best bit is it runs on Linux! :)
Check out the live demo too..... seems to work pretty well in poor light conditions!


"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47

The Axis 2120 is a digital still camera running an embedded version of Linux.

It is not designed to be portable, as its power supply and case are aimed at security and permanent webcam use, but you could modify it appropriately.

It's also got motion detection and inbuilt Apache.

I'm amazed that nobody hasn't mentioned Bluetooth. IMHO it's just the thing you described.

If you stop by the IBM Wearables Lab in New York, you can take a look at a wristwatch that runs on linux, and leverages its stable threading model.

Palm OS and Windows CE are great for doing PDA's, but when you decide to install them onto a VCR or a car stereo you will find them considerable less flexible or configurable than Linux. Everyone here knows how easy it is to get a minimum footprint of Linux running with only the modules you need. And Linux's licensing terms are considerably more flexible than Palm or WinCE.

I am working in the technical strategy phase on a consumer appliance that will be Bluetooth-enabled. Linux lets us get coding right off the bat with the great drivers at Axis.

Try coding and testing Bluetooth support with one of the commercial embedded OS's!

Corby

Of more interest is the 2120 (about 850UKP), which has built-in motion detection, 25fps (PAL) and it's weatherproof (I think. I read it somewhere but now I can't see it in the spec). Check out the live feed of 45 and 5th and stress test one of these beauties.

Of more interest is the 2120 (about 850UKP), which has built-in motion detection, 25fps (PAL) and it's weatherproof (I think. I read it somewhere but now I can't see it in the spec). Check out the live feed of 45 and 5th and stress test one of these beauties.

Have you considered adding a stack of SCSI drives onto a server somewhere and using the HDD's as your backup device?

A couple of years ago I realized I really needed a decent backup solution. I started looking around at tape drives but, as you've apparently also found, they were really expensive and didn't offer much capacity when compared to the hard drives I needed to back up. That's when I realized that just setting aside a couple 20 Gb HDD's for backups made way more sense than blindly following the "traditional" tape-backup route. Why follow the herd? Get yourself a RAID setup with a stack of IDE drives. Backup your important data onto the server overnight (or whenever).

If you want something a bit more glamorous, take a look at the StorPoint NAS 100 from AXIS. It's about $1000 retail - I don't believe any SCSI disks are included (I know, more than you wanted to spend). But the beauty of this thing is, much like the AXIS video camera many here on /. have oohed and awwed about, you can just drop it onto your network - no dedicated file server required.

Fight the power! Forget the tapes! ;)

Have you considered adding a stack of SCSI drives onto a server somewhere and using the HDD's as your backup device?

A couple of years ago I realized I really needed a decent backup solution. I started looking around at tape drives but, as you've apparently also found, they were really expensive and didn't offer much capacity when compared to the hard drives I needed to back up. That's when I realized that just setting aside a couple 20 Gb HDD's for backups made way more sense than blindly following the "traditional" tape-backup route. Why follow the herd? Get yourself a RAID setup with a stack of IDE drives. Backup your important data onto the server overnight (or whenever).

If you want something a bit more glamorous, take a look at the StorPoint NAS 100 from AXIS. It's about $1000 retail - I don't believe any SCSI disks are included (I know, more than you wanted to spend). But the beauty of this thing is, much like the AXIS video camera many here on /. have oohed and awwed about, you can just drop it onto your network - no dedicated file server required.

Fight the power! Forget the tapes! ;)

The uClinux ports page has a picture of a CISCO 3000 running uClinux. The picture was taken with a AXIS web camera the really cool thing is that the new AXIS 2100 WEB camera runs uClinux. A great commercial use for uClinux if you ask me. As for the older CISCO 3000 .. I just think it is neat! uClinux running on the Motorola 68EN302 processor. Linux on mmu-less devices is truely here to stay. If customs will let me through the border with them, I will bring the CISCO and the AXIS camera to the ESC trade show in San Jose. I will be at the Lineo booth.

I wonder when they go opensource and ask Slashdotters for help...

Regarding yanking out the batteries, you should check out the Journaling Flash File System. Regarding squeezing the kernel onto a PDA, check out the Cram File System (in the 2.4 kernel), which compresses data on a per-page basis.

All Axis equipment has RS232, Parallel port, SCSI, EIDE, Ethernet and Token Ring support. The only difference is what is plugged in... About the only thing that's missing from their own ETRAX processor is a MMU, but you can live without that. It's a lovely processor for building anything net-aware.

All Axis equipment has RS232, Parallel port, SCSI, EIDE, Ethernet and Token Ring support. The only difference is what is plugged in... About the only thing that's missing from their own ETRAX processor is a MMU, but you can live without that. It's a lovely processor for building anything net-aware.

Put a Bluetooth radio on it along with the Linux Bluetooth stack, link it to your Bluetooth aware cell phone and you've almost got a Dick Tracy watch.

Of course, it's probably esier just to use your cell phone.

• Axis stack (GPL)
• 3Com stack (custom, private, and might not ever get released.)
• a fork of the Axis stack by a german company, might be merged back into the Axis stack (GPL)
• IBM's stack (propriatary license, no source)

IBM is only releasing binaries. How useless. Try the Linux Bluetooth page for source code under GPL.

They seem to have a lot of nifty stuff there.

No, i'm not in any way associated with them.

They seem to have a lot of nifty stuff there.

No, i'm not in any way associated with them.

One of my consulting sites is trying the Quickcam solution. Take an image off the Quickcam 1 or 2 (cqam for example), pump it off site to a system in a secure location and then every hour convert those images to an MPEG movie (for compression). This is possible because of the cool, inexpensive new disks that are 40-60gb and those disks can be grouped together relatively inexpensively. Maxi cool to have an old Pentium with 210gb of disks and still be lurking around $1400.

Remember to 'protect' the location for as long as it will take to notice the theft. Often the time is pretty long (4-5 days) because of things like Xmas eve, Xmas, Sat, Sun sequences.

I'm about to try the Axis Communications Axis 2100 Network Camera ($500ish each) dumped (via server push) to a set of large disks to cover where my car is parked in an alley.

Either of these alternatives massively beats the camera to tape solution, as that requires much to much recurring maintenance. A timelaps VCR is only good for 2-3 years because the heads and transport wear out pretty quickly. The camera to disk solution should be maintenance free.

One more thing. The current owners of Quickcam (Logitech) don't give a damn about Open Software. Please avoid them if at all possible. You should write them and ask why they've not released a programming spec for any of their cameras. Kensington has a Linux USB camera driver in the works.

They only thing they won't let us do is take a picture of our cage -- no cameras allowed anywhere in the facility!

Hmm. When I worked for a startup with a cage at Exodus, we put an AXIS Network Camera in our cage. Since our cage was right by the door, we could see anyone coming in or out of their facility....

They've designed their own custom RISC processor with built-in network support and quite a lot of very neat I/O ( A dream come true for telecomms embedded people).

It's not very RISCy. It looks more like a almost-68000 with delay slot branches (if I remember right). It has a bunch of indirect addressing modes not found on most (or any) RISCs. Of corse it doens't have to be a RISC. It runs pretty quick (50Mhz? 100Mhz?), as you say it has lots of good I/O features and built-in networking.

It is a pretty cool CPU for the right target. But it ain't a RISC.

People who want to know more about a cool embeded CPU with lots of networking and I/O features should definitly checkout their little CISC CPU.

Anyone that thinks it is a RISC chould check out page 17 of the ETRAX 100 Data Sheet, and then maybe the John Mashey "What Is RISC" essay. Enjoy.

They've designed their own custom RISC processor with built-in network support and quite a lot of very neat I/O ( A dream come true for telecomms embedded people).

It's not very RISCy. It looks more like a almost-68000 with delay slot branches (if I remember right). It has a bunch of indirect addressing modes not found on most (or any) RISCs. Of corse it doens't have to be a RISC. It runs pretty quick (50Mhz? 100Mhz?), as you say it has lots of good I/O features and built-in networking.

It is a pretty cool CPU for the right target. But it ain't a RISC.

People who want to know more about a cool embeded CPU with lots of networking and I/O features should definitly checkout their little CISC CPU.

Anyone that thinks it is a RISC chould check out page 17 of the ETRAX 100 Data Sheet, and then maybe the John Mashey "What Is RISC" essay. Enjoy.

There's also a link on that page for a bluetooth driver for linux. Anyone know of any bluetooth hardware already available? They mention that the driver supports any hardware that implements the HCI UART Transport Layer.
dan

Yopy has most certainly a JFS-like solution for its flash memory, but as Yopy itself is not in production yet and there's yet no source to be seen, I don't know for certain.
That's what I find so nice about the JFFS: It's here, and it's here now. And with an "established" JFFS, Linux PDA manufacturers and manufacturers of many other types of embedded devices with flash memory maybe won't have to re-invent the same thing over and over. So you're right, PDA manufacturers don't have to use this and they can use whatever they seem fit, including their own custom solutions, but still I think that this is great because PDA manufacturers won't have to invent some solution of their own.

I don't know if there are other documented journaling flash file systems for Linux out there, but I know that I haven't seen one before.

They've released all their patches (it's a custom 2.0.36 kernel, see their developer page) and they're thinking of switching all their devices from a proprietary, custom in-house os, to Linux (well, maybe not the printer servers, because they have to be very cheap and cannot have megs of RAM) but all their other devices. So if you want to support an upstart company using Linux, buy their stuff =)

They work close together with Ericsson, so I'm not surprised about Axis beeing one of the first with Bluetooth drivers...

(Note: I'm not affiliated with Axis)

Here's the AXIS URL for their camera servers.

Would probably work very well for you - Ethernet eliminates your distance problem, and standard TCP/IP eliminates any compatibility issues...

Axis provides DVD servers... you could put 5 or 6 DVD drives in a server...

Axis products have been relatively reliable for all of our uses...

http://www.axis.com/products/cd-rom_se rvers/

is the address