How we built a web controlled robot with SSL tunnels and perl | Hacker News Reader

How we built a web controlled robot with SSL tunnels and perl

cam.ly

24 pointsdanecjensen6 comments

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.

He's got more system() than perl. Probably just should have used a bash script.

You know there's trouble when they use system("echo...") to write to a file!

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.

silly, yes. but nonetheless, an accurate reflection of how many people view that sphere of activity known as "perl scripting." i.e. pretty much like bash scripting, but with slightly different punctuation.

  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.

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....

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