

How we built a web controlled robot with SSL tunnels and perl - danecjensen
http://cam.ly/blog/2010/10/how-the-pinata-buster-works/

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brandon
I find the "and perl" part particularly dubious. Here's an excerpt:

    
    
      system("echo '$mydata' > /home/rhett/usernick");
      system('/home/rhett/music_player.rb &');
      system('/home/rhett/servos/phidgets-examples/AdvancedServo-simple &');
    

As a former perl hacker, this kind of stuff was infuriating to me before, but
it just seems silly now.

~~~
heyrhett
Hi, I helped to make this. It actually uses a smattering of different
technologies. Namely:

Perl, Ruby, C, Javascript, Apache, SSL tunnels, an electric wheelchair, and
hobby servos from phidgets.

We didn't mean to be misleading to the perl lovers, it was just too long to
post all of that in the title.

Not more than a few lines of each, and it truly is more of a hack than
anything else.

BTW, we just changed the 1 line of system("echo...") to have perl print the
file to avoid any potential security vulnerability.

------
mleonhard

      Serving live video over the internet
    
      The Cam.ly security camera and interface system is super
      simple to set up. Plug power into the camera and connect
      it to the internet. Point and shoot. We slightly changed
      the interface for the pinata buster. We won’t talk more
      about this part because how it works exactly is a trade
      secret.
    

It's seriously disappointing that they refuse to talk about the streaming
code. Last year I tried to build a web-enabled robot. I never found a way to
stream the live video from the web-cam to a flash widget. There were lots of
online services and commercial products, but no open-source stack.

It looks like Cam.ly will become unusable when the manufacturer's online web
service goes down.

~~~
danecjensen
We're actually working on making the cameras run a rtmp server locally, so
soon you'll be able to stream it to your own flash widget. The Cam.ly is also
a completely open source product. We encourage hacking:
[http://cam.ly/blog/2010/08/different-ways-to-modify-your-
cam...](http://cam.ly/blog/2010/08/different-ways-to-modify-your-cam-ly/).

