Category Archives: Hardware
Nokia LD-3W with Ricoh Caplio 500SE
We’ve just tried a Nokia LD-3W bluetooth GPS dongle with the Ricoh Caplio 500SE camera we’ve been using for taking photographs – and it rocks. The LD-3W paired with the Ricoh bluetooth really easily (using the default PIN of 0000), … Continue reading
Cheap IP cameras: the Edimax IC-3010WG
A much cheaper solution for IP video than the Axis Q7401, the Edimax IC-3010WG network camera is only ยฃ80 from use-IP.co.uk. For your money, you get a white plastic camera with a choice of wired or wifi network connections with … Continue reading
First look at the Axis video encoder.
Yesterday was our first opportunity to take the brand new Axis Q7401 video encoder for a test drive. It’s a well engineered and rugged unit which takes composite video and turns it into an M-JPEG or h.264 MPEG-4 stream. The … Continue reading
UNR, revisited.
One of our netbooks needed rebuilding recently, and since we’ve not documented the installation procedure we used, now seems like a good time. We’ve been running our Asus EEE 901s on Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04 (UNR), since the supplied Xandros … Continue reading
Axis of Openness
Frustrated with the poor image quality and/or interfaces of our existing IP cameras, it’s time to search for better alternatives. New trends in IP camera technology include megapixel sensors, h.264 video encoding and, reportedly, open standards. There are several interesting … Continue reading
Testing IP cameras, part 2
Now we’ve seen that the nice and simple DCS-900 is pretty handy when controlled from Linux with no ActiveX. Time to examine the much more complex DCS-3220g, which should give us MPEG-4 encoded video. It’s another rebadged Vivotek as far … Continue reading
Testing IP cameras – pt.1
Since ERA already has some IP cameras from previous years, it’s probably time to dust them off and try them out with the new Asus 901s. We have a pair of D-Link badged items – a DCS-900 wired-only Motion-JPEG camera … Continue reading
Sipdroid works on G1 Android 1.5
Good news sipdroid works with our Asterisk server. Following up on a lead I received from Ben Charlton at the JISCRI developers workshop last week, I tried running sipdroid on a borrowed G1 Android phone (big thanks to Paul Hogan). … Continue reading
Using smartphones as …phones.
Could it be that the way to make a telephone call on a geology site would be to use a telephone? Now we seem to have some fairly stable WiFi networking hardware, and are considering that we might ditch the … Continue reading
Investigating video upgrades
During our field trials, it became clear that the built-in video camera on the Asus EEE 901 (and 701) is in the wrong place for our needs. The 901 camera itself is a pretty good (for a plastic lens webcam) … Continue reading