My last project was setting up a wireless, battery-operated Raspberry Pi time lapse video shooting rig. This works very well when it is able to connect to a WiFi network that it is familiar with. When at home, I can easily get the Pi to connect to my home WiFi and remote into it with VNC Viewer from my iPad or Macbook. However, if I’m out of my WiFi network’s range, I can’t connect to preview my camera’s view or to verify that it’s working.
So, instead of having the Pi connect to WiFi, I turned the built-in WiFi card into an access point. This was all made possible by an excellent tutorial by Phillip Martin. Now I can connect my iPad or Macbook directly to the Pi to preview the images captured by the camera, tweak the script that takes the pictures or to transfer folders of images from the device to my computer.
When the picture-taking has finished, I can connect to the same access point with my Macbook and copy files and folders from the Pi to my computer for processing. Since I know I’ll forget the specifics and come back here to find them. I need to first connect to the AP (ssid: RPi4VNC, password hint:Luther Long) and then open a terminal window and use secure copy (scp):
scp -r pi@172.24.1.1:/home/pi/09-23_21-26-02 ~/Desktop/09-23_21-26-02
-r Means recursively
pi@ Means logging in as user “pi”
172.24.1.1 is the static ip address set up in Phrillip’s blog post
/home/pi/09-23_21-26-02 is the folder I’m copying
~/Desktop/09-23_21-26-02 is the destination folder on my Macbook