Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks.

Regardless the age of an old programming dog, new tricks are pretty important to learn.

My initial success with night sky photography with my Canon EOS Rebel T3 tumbled in my mind over the last few days.  Recorded remnants of a thought from a few years ago popped up when searching an old personal hard drive...  An automated search for meteor photos.

Well, I was nearly there.  After spending a few nights with ImageMagick and some meteor photos, I built a basic recipe to find meteor strikes in night sky photos.

Hey, I thought...  I have a PINE64 on order.  Wouldn't that be cool to make one of these tiny ARM based computers comb through photos for meteors?  Ohhh...  With a little thought this could be easily scalable.  What about controlling my camera with one of these PINE64 computers?  Maybe a loosely coupled cluster of these $15 computers to search these photos in different ways?

I needed a control language for this; something interpreted and not terribly complex.  It only needs to be able to run shell commands, copy files and talk to MySQL.  Lua had my vote until I tried MySQL.  After two hours of trying to make it work on my Windows 7 computer, the necessity for a different language became apparent.  Sorry Lua.

A buddy of mine at work likes Python.  My daughter learned a little Python at college last year.  Python is a language specifically being ported to the Pine64.  The memory footprint of Python is larger than that of Lua but should work fine in the constrained environment of the Pine64.  MySQL Connector was easy to install and setup.  After a running a few little trial scripts, I was convinced Python would be my control language for this little project.

So, over the last week or so, this old dog has learned a few new tricks; and he is enjoying it!