Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am laying a project to rest. Let’s get started.
The past couple weeks, I’ve been working to make a video call from my Raspberry Pi using the PiCamera taped into the case. Only this week did I learn it was too ambitious when I stopped by the workshop and actually started testing what worked. I managed to get a inbound stream, and presumably good audio (there weren’t any speakers connected at the time), but the video stream coming from the Discord webapp in Chromium came through way too slowly to be of any use but for a good laugh.
My time on this project was not wasted, though. I learned a lot about both how the PiCamera works and what it can do and what the Pi itself cannot do. It turns out the Raspberry Pi has all its graphics on the CPU, meaning no specialized circuitry for videos to begin with. That isn’t to say it cannot handle ANY streaming. It did manage to pull off viewing the live broadcast of my church’s services for the last couple Sabbaths with only a few problems. It’s likely something to do with the resolution and frame rate it’s trying to work through. That or trying to send non-existent audio while streaming video is a little much for the little computer.
This project was fun, but I simply don’t have the skills to pull it off at this time. If I ever do get it working, I expect it to be on a tiny, 64 bit OS for the Pi written just for video chat and nothing else.
On an unrelated note, I plan on separating the Pi itself from the cat deterrent(s). It will hopefully solve the power problems if I set up a little, offline network connected by radio or WiFi. Maybe I’ll take apart an old wireless mouse and see if I can use that.
Final Question: If you want to stretch your abilities, you should pick goals just outside of your abilities. What was the last project you tried, but found was just a little bit too far out of your reach?