Built the class for the PTZ but unfortunately I can only get the camera to pan UP or DOWN or STOP. Using HTTP Requests. Nothing else works even though I’m using the API documentation.
I’ll try to find a Python library for ONVIF and see if that route changes anything.
I also have a script going through my camera footage (saved from motion detection) and pulling frames and making text documents for use in training my own YOLO model. It uses the standard YOLO model and when it thinks it sees a horse or a cow, it generates frame imagery and boundary boxes for a moose. The boundary boxes are not exactly tight, they’re not awful, so I’ll be interested to see how well my custom trained model does. Might see if I can make a tool allow me to drag the boxes and adjust the dataset with tighter boxes.
Just read the first post and watched the introductory video and your property and cabin looks lovely. I am much jealous of the views. The video was lovely, I loved both of your narrations. I loved to see all your neighbors as well.
I will track this post and read the rest in the coming days.
The hardware setup you suggested looks good to me. Only advise I might have is to look into Dual Actuator HDDs. As the name implies they have two actuators that can read and write data, which gives you a higher throughput and IOPS. You would need to set them up in an array though. Wendell has a guide for that here on the forum. Might be an advantage if you want to safe more camera streams (but I do not know the bandwidth of your streams or if you read them at the same time from disk).
Apart from that, if I understood you correctly you want to place the computer in the culvert? Would humidity or even moisture be a problem there? How would you go about to tackle this?
I assume you have plenty of power/battery power to run this thing 24x7 … given your remote location and I assume the relative inconvenience of quickly getting spares, I think you should consider splitting the build into two?
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll look into that. Are those dual actuator HDDs better than SSD?
Yes, it will all be in the culvert. Moisture isn’t a problem but humidity is an issue. I think it will get better as the concrete floor cures over time but I’m not sure. We have a dehumidifier that pumps the moisture outside so hopefully the humidity level decreases over time.
We have plenty of power for the summer, but in the winter we’ll depend on a diesel generator to keep the batteries full on lower production solar days. We could scale back the cameras and the load on the computer in the winter if we needed to though since the bears will be asleep.
I’m not sure about splitting the build into two. What would that look like? I guess redundancy would be the goal? Something to think about, thanks for the recommendation.
It depends, do you see having a single workload covering all your needs? If so then the second one would be like a cold standby … if not, then you can run things separately and in case of failure have a means to move workloads across … the NAS would became the place where you save/store data and configs …
Unfortunately I don’t know enough yet to gauge the workload. But I was envisioning one server so that it would have all resources available (CPU and GPUs primarily) with the hope that if the GPU doesn’t need to be cranking at full speed, less power would be consumed. Then in the summer I’d do training of any models or anything more intensive since I’d have lots of power.
I’m thinking the server will do all the processing with a healthy SSD (or maybe one of those dual actuator HDDs but I haven’t yet looked into that) and then final products (video) will be shuffled off to the NAS for storage.
In the off chance that somebody here owns a Yarbo, we’re going to buy one before this next winter to keep the deck clear of snow if we take a weekend trip to the big city. Should be able to work autonomously and we confirmed that we can set it up and then deprive it of Internet so that it’s not spying on us (of course it might have a SIM card built in somewhere).
For now I just use a lithium battery powered blower and it works nicely.
That is a strategy, but we need to agree on what is less power, as you might look at (finger in the air) 150-180w idle draw with that mobo/CPU, that amount of ecc dimms and two 4090s … Who knows how much if you really crank it all up to LLM heaven
I can live with that kind of idle draw. It’s certainly not nothing though. Roughly 5KWh of power a day if your napkin math is close and our solar can provide that and it will only become an issue for maybe three or four months of the year. But we’d have options even then. If power becomes scarce with the clouds in the dark season we could either a) heat the cabin with diesel instead of the heat pump and then there’d be plenty of solar most likely for the server and our other loads, or b) heat the cabin with firewood (which we won’t do because we don’t like fire risk), or c) run the diesel generator and provide the power that way if it’s a really thin time.
We should have our full 25KW of solar panels installed this summer with optimum winter angles. Should be enough but we’ll expect to burn some diesel whether to heat or to charge the batteries regardless.
Then go with the monolith approach and, if it breaks, it’s only going to be until you find a spare.
When the youtube channel becomes so big that you can afford to double up (and then some) then you can revisit the strategy …
5Kw added to a 18Kw (assuming 15Kwh at 80%DoD) storage seemed like a lot to me considering winter and heat pumps and possibly multiple days of bad weather …
Amazing video! It is certainly like watching a real life RimWorld and getting horrified to see all the wildlife. It is an interesting lifestyle choice.
I’d caution about your smaller guests though. Ticks are vectors for nasty diseases (see Wendell’s acquired AlphaGal allergy) they might throw a curve ball in your plans of surviving in the cold. I know that the Lonestar Tick lives in the warm climate but who knows what is out there on the frontier? Also the squirrels might gnaw on your wires and lines - so again, I’d look at them with more caution.
I never saw the color of your roofing due to snow. If it is not covered with solar. Might I suggest to paint them black in the next painting cycle to soak more warmth
in the summer?
I wonder what will break more, this server build or our ATVs. Redundancy is definitely a must have out here, always a good idea for sure.
The 25KW will be our solar array after this summer (currently we just have 7KW of solar up). Our lithium batteries are 38KWh. We’re considering doubling the lithium but I don’t want to do that until I get all the data. I’m not sure it would be worth it. Might be though.
Thanks for taking the time to watch it and share your thoughts. I’m not familiar with RimWorld but will check it out. Outside of the bears, the wildlife here isn’t horrifying although the moose should horrify us because they’re so dangerous. They act like super chill zen masters but then they can go complete meth head in an instant, very unpredictable.
We actually sent several ticks the first season into the State of Alaska. They don’t carry Lyme up here, thankfully, and the only trouble ticks are ones that hitch onto dogs that get brought up. Our squirrel ticks do carry tularemia though, but that’s mostly on the interior of the State. But you’re right, the ticks are nasty and I am hoping my genocide of them in our forest pays dividends. We don’t have any opossums to enjoy the ticks (although one recently did hitch a ride up, and now Grubby is in the zoo in Anchorage). I use tweezers to pull the ticks off and then I burn them at the stake until they make a satisfying pop.
Edit: just read up on Wendell’s affliction, I had no idea. I remember one of his News podcasts hearing him talk about how he couldn’t eat meat and had some dietary concerns, but didn’t realize it was from a tick. That sucks. I handle so much wildlife I wouldn’t be shocked if I don’t catch something. But I like rubbing squirrel bellies too much to stop. The Raven who stopped by was sick, really sick, and I handled him. I’ll probably eventually end up with a Darwin Award but I honestly don’t care. Got to go sometime, I like animals too much and there is no way Ray Kurzweil and the tech billionaires will let me in on their telomere replacement technology, so whatever.
Good point on the squirrels, so far we keep them so well fed that they haven’t been an issue. But we can’t afford to trust them, so conduit is a must for any wires exposed outside.
Our roof is forest green and a black roof might make sense in the shoulder season. In the summer we have so much power from the sun that heating with the heat pump from 40-50F to 75F or so is no issue, plus we get a lot of passive heating through the large Bearicade in the front of the cabin every morning since we face directly East.
In the winter when we’d really like to have a black roof, our cabin does not even see direct sun.
Rimworld is a video game that the TeamPGP used to play. Its a an ugly looking but amazing sandbox game that has you start from scratch because the game characters you control crash landed on a planet at the edge of known space and they have to find or rebuild a spaceship from scratch and trade with surrounding villages. Thankfully there are no roving pirate gangs and killer robots sent by an omniscient AI out there in Alaska. But you do get wandering black and brown bears though and they don’t need to be rabid to cause problems (there are wandering rabid animals in the game).
The animals are my favorite part of living out here, but also a daily reminder of my personal Theodicy. How God could create a world where the most basic element of life is death itself is beyond me, where to live you must kill (and many plants also kill other life to include the paramecium which even leverages photosynthesis). I don’t like it one bit. I don’t need to delve into human nature or history, just this basic fact of life, that you have to kill animals and/or plants daily to survive in a world filled with free energy from the sun…if there were a cosmic complaint form this would be my submission. It’s easy to forget this uncomfortable fact of life, except out here where you see it constantly.
But it’s cool to see some of the bonds created as a result. We work together with the Gray Jays to run off goshawks. It’s a team effort with them doing most of the work. The squirrels sound the alarm, the Jays dive bomb and harass the hawk, we yell at the bird to get it to leave. Everybody works together and there is a sense of community. And DJ E knows we’re on Team Weasel. She is as wild as can be and for good reason, PTSD is a constant for her, she’s always on edge, but I can tell she trusts us. She was squeaking out alarms under the grow bed after an eagle almost got her, frantic, but when I brought a tube over to her she knew I was trying to help and she was unconcerned about me. Of course the majestic eagles were just trying to live as well and that weasel is nothing but pure bloody viciousness packed into a cute form. There is no right or wrong in any of it, just creatures capable of love inflicting pain because this is the world the Creator forced us into. But like Job, the Divine didn’t ask me for my opinion on creating the world, I’m still trying to figure out HTTP Requests so perhaps I’m out of my depth here.
Amazing stuff guys, hats off to embarking on such an adventure.
You referenced a KVM so you could access your server from different locations throughout the property. Especially if you’re going to leverage GPUs and have fiber throughout the property, I would look into Sunshine / Moonlight to stream the desktop to external clients. A 10 year old Celeron laptop can handle decoding the h.264 stream, and can still SSH back into your system when needed.
