Salutations

Hi!  I'm starting this blog to chronicle the development of a hobby project using the Raspberry Pi platform that I'm referring to as the "Pi Eye".

What is the Pi Eye?

Simply put, the Pi Eye is a standalone streaming webcam on the rPi platform.  The plan is to use as much freely-available open-source components as possible (except when I get a wild-eyed urge to build something ground-up like, say, a web server - more on that to follow).  The plan is to build something cool and useful and to learn some things along the way.  I'm sharing the experience so that hopefully others can benefit from my stubbed toes and blind wanderings (as well as to get input and advice from the community of users).

A quick tidbit on background: I'm a moderately-skilled programmer and linux user.  My background and schooling is in digital signal processing but I have been in analytical business applications software (SaaS / Cloud "Predictive Analytics" software) for the past 10 years.  I'm most familiar with C/C++ and C# and have used Visual Studio for most of my professional career, but have also used Java, eclipse, and Linux-based development.  My focus has always been on mathematical algorithms and I do a lot of work and prototyping in Matlab, for what that's worth.

I make no claims to being an expert in any of these languages or platforms, but part of the fun of this project for me is getting back into Linux-based dev (something I haven't done much of professionally for upwards of 5 years).  I'm kind of ecstatic about the pi platform and its possibilities, and hopefully can convince a couple of folks to give it a look.

Another objective is to build some tools for the platform to provide a smoother "on-ramp" for non-*[nix/nux]-hax0rs.

Hopefully a few folks in the hobbyist/pi/enthusiast communities will find some of this interesting (or, more selfishly, provide me with some tips and pointers).  I'll make all of the code freely available as well under some TBD minimally-restrictive license.