Beagleboard: Power usage (current draw) for certain scenarios

Below are some unscientific tests done on my Beagleboard.  I hooked up my multimeter to determine current draw for several states.

Here are the results.

During Xubuntu boot, with 1x webcam and Wifi stick:

.500A to .900A

Boot, no attachments:
.300-.450A

Pandaboard & Beagleboard: Using rsync and cron to backup a directory

This post is about using rsync to ensure a local directory's contents are backed up to a server.

I currently have a beagleboard running as a security camera (link to tutorial) and have mounted a remote Samba share locally.  I would like the Beagleboard to copy the security footage every 2 minutes to the server and in a separate step I'll then delete files over a certain age.

This way the Beagleboard's SD card will not get full and I'll have a secure, backed up server holding the footage.

PandaBoard: Using a Webcam as a Security Camera

Assumptions:

The following assumes you are running Ubuntu on your PandaBoard or BeagleBoard.  It also assumes the board has a working Internet connection.  If you need to set up Wifi see this post here: http://adventuresinsilicon.blogspot.com/2011/01/pandaboard-setting-up-wifi-on-comand.html


This tutorial is about setting up a headless Pandaboard or BeagleBoard with a webcam attached. This webcam will act as a security camera and will record videos when motion is detected.

Steps:

1. Install an SSH server so we can login from another computer on the network
2. Install 'motion' software which controls the camera
3. Configure motion
4. Automatically start motion on startup

Coming soon - Using an Arduino to control a 3d game engine

Soon I'll post the rudimentary elements needed to use sensor data captured by an Arduino to control the world inside a 3D game engine (Irrlicht).

This engine can run on a PC or Beagleboard/Pandaboard and this means you can interface with robotics easily.

ETA is a couple of weeks at most.