SSH with DSA public key authentication - password less login

After taking pictures on your raspberry pi you might want to transfer the images to your PC. You can use several methods but I'm going to use scp over ssh using password less login. That way I can automate the transfer.
In this example I used following devices

Raspberry pi, IP 192.168.1.10 and user pi
Linux laptop, IP 192.168.1.20 and user foo

Step 1: Create Authentication SSH-Kegen Keys on the raspberry pi

Login to your rpi 192.168.1.10 with user pi to generate a pair of public keys

[pi@raspbmc ~]$ ssh-keygen -t dsa

If you do not want to give your file a name, just press enter. Or you can

Generating public/private dsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/pi/.ssh/id_dsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in .ssh/id_dsa.
Your public key has been saved in .ssh/id_dsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
83:8d:95:48:d3:25:11:48:f5:de:53:47:98:54:a2:b6 pi@pi
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ DSA 1024]----+
|         .++==++o|
|         ..+.+o..|
|          +   o.o|
|       o o   . +o|
|      . B   . .Eo|
|         .   .  .|
|            . +  |
|    a   o.       |
|          .      |
+-----------------+

Step 2: Upload Generated Public Keys to – 192.168.1.20

Use SSH from server 192.168.1.1 and upload new generated public key (id_rsa.pub) on server 192.168.1.20 under pi‘s .ssh directory as a file name authorized_keys.

[pi@raspbmc ~]$ cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh foo@192.168.1.20 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'
foo@192.168.1.20's password:

Step 3: Set Permissions on – 192.168.1.20

Due to different SSH versions on servers, you might need to set permissions on the .ssh directory and the authorized_keys file.

[pi@raspbmc ~]$ ssh foo@192.168.1.20 "chmod 700 .ssh; chmod 640 .ssh/authorized_keys"
foo@192.168.1.20's password: [Enter Your Password Here]

From now onwards you can log into 192.168.1.20 as foo user from server 192.168.1.10 as pi user without password.

[pi@raspbmc ~]$ ssh foo@192.168.1.20

And now you can use scp to transfer files manually or you can automate transfer with script

scp file foo@192.168.1.20:/tmp

cURL timeout problem and solution

One page I made uses cURL to scrape small data from external web page. The problem I faced was when the page was offline for a while, my page did not load.

The fix I stumbled into was to add these three lines to my code.

 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT_MS, 5000);
 $curl_errno = curl_errno($ch);
 $curl_error = curl_error($ch);
 

Now my page still runs when the remote page is down and I get a error message.

 $url = $_GET['url'];
 $ch = curl_init();
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOSIGNAL, 1);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
 /* set timeout in ms */
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT_MS, 5000);
 $data = curl_exec($ch);
 $curl_errno = curl_errno($ch);
 $curl_error = curl_error($ch);
 curl_close($ch);

 if ($curl_errno > 0) {
  echo "cURL Error ($curl_errno): $curl_error\n";
  } else {
  echo $match[0][0]);
  }

Timelapse with Rapberry Pi camera module

As I have mentioned before I always wanted the camera module for the Raspberry Pi. Until now I had only tried out timelapse using my laptop web camera, and that gave me really crappy images. Now I have the camera module to play with and the images are way better. This is timelapse from 12:00 31. Des 2013 to 12:00 1. Jan 2014 shows 24 Hours in 5 minutes and 26 sec. including some fireworks.



This script will take image every 5 seconds 1440 times leaving you with just enough to create 60 sec timelaps video using 24 fsp

#!/bin/bash
# Timelapse controller for USB webcam
DIR=/home/user/timelapse
x=1
while [ $x -le 1440 ]; do                                                       
filename=$(date -u +"%Y%m%d-%H%M-%S").jpg                                       
raspistill -o $DIR/$filename -w 1280 -h 960 -n -t 1000
x=$(( $x + 1 ))
sleep 5;
done

Now you have 1440 images or the number you entered and next step is to create the video. Copy the images to your computer using scp or rsync, you can add that to your script if the Raspberry pi is connected to network. When you have all your images on your computer you can render video with mencoder. Install mencoder if needed.

sudo apt-get install mencoder

#!/bin/bash
DIR=/home/user/timelapse/
ls $DIR/*.jpg > list.txt
mencoder -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:aspect=16/9:vbitrate=8000000 -vf scale=640:480 -o $DIR/$(date -u +"%Y%d%m-%H%M-%S").avi -mf type=jpeg:fps=24 mf://@list.txt
rm list.txt

All ideas about improving this code are welcome.
-cheers