We’ve put together a quick list of the most exciting things we’ve learned about Oak River Technology. A lot of this information is not new, but is worth re-learning as you read throughout the article.
Oak River is a company that has been making “smart” cameras for a few years now. They make them that are able to run on batteries, and even in the case of the cameras, they use a microcontroller to tell them when they should turn on and off. You can use this as a great place to get into the tech we know as “smart devices,” but it is no substitute for actually using one of them in the real world.
One of the most interesting aspects of Oak River’s video cameras is the fact that they use a Raspberry Pi to control them. This is not because the Raspberry Pi is a bad device; it actually works quite well and is easy to use. They use a Raspberry Pi Model B with an integrated web camera to track objects in their environment and then use a Raspberry Pi Model B with a camera that is actually connected to the camera.
In general, I like to keep the RPi on the low-latency side so that the camera can operate more quickly. This is why I like to keep the RPi on my computer as well as one of the five Raspberry Pi computers on the Oak Rivers network. This allows all the computers to have a common database of what is happening and allows them to share data and information.
I like this because I like the ease of keeping things up-to-date and because I like the RPi’s low-latency so the camera can operate more quickly. If the RPi was on the same network as a Raspberry Pi Model B though, there is some possibility that the RPi would be able to stream video directly to the camera.
I’m a little surprised that Oak River isn’t charging Oak River users for access to the Raspberry Pi database. It is one of the reasons I like the RPi. The RPi is a low-latency, low-bandwidth device so it could stream video directly to the camera while the RPi is on its network.
Oak River is a company that makes a lot of things for Raspberry Pi. I’m glad that they’re keeping that software open source, because it would be nice to have a Raspberry Pi camera that could stream video and still have its video saved locally.
What might be less obvious is that you might be able to stream video to the camera as well, but only if you have a Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi camera is a single-board computer (a microcontroller), which is used to stream video to the RPi camera. In other words, you need a Raspberry Pi that is capable of running the RPi software.
I think I can say that at least one Raspberry Pi is out there, and that will be the one I buy next. So if you’re thinking about getting a Raspberry Pi, you might want to think about whether you want to buy a Raspberry Pi that you can stream video to instead of a Raspberry Pi that you can run software on.
In the movie, Oak River Technology appears as a small company that builds cameras. Oak River specializes in one-of-a-kind cameras, and their website lists a number of these cameras that are sold at retail. These include the Oak River G50, Oak River CX50, and Oak River X10.
