Skip to content

Instructions – Hardware

What hardware is needed?

  • 2 x Raspberry Pi 4 computers for cameras
  • 1 x Raspberry Pi 3 computer for router
  • 2 x Cases for Raspberry Pi. For example LABISTS is a very nice camera case with standard camera mount.
  • 1 x Case for third raspberry Pi, not important which one
  • 3 x High quality micro SD card (Sandisk Ultra Micro 80Mb/s)
  • 2 x v2.1 standard camera module for Raspberry Pi
  • Battery power for the camera pods, big powerbanks works. 15000mah should last all day.
  • 2 x 60M Cat5e or better network cable
  • 3 x 1m network cables
  • 1 x 1GBit network switch
  • One host computer (base station)
  • Portable speaker such as a bluetooth speaker
  • Camera stands of some sort
  • A way to measure quite long distances reliably
  • An  SD card reader
  • Micro HDMI Cable, and perhaps a standard cable if ou choose to use Raspberry Pi 3 for router

The Raspberry 4 computers are the camera pods. Sleipnir works by measuring the time it takes to pass the center line of each camera. The camera pods are connected to a switch which is also connected to the base station. Raspberry Pi runs the Linux operating system and the base station preferably runs windows 10. There is also a third raspberry, the router, it does housekeeping parts of the system, DHCP assign IP addresses, NTP keeps track of time, DNS for the lan of computers. There is also a possibility to install IP Masquarade on the router if you want to surf the web on the host computer, or any other computer on the network.

What kind of computer is needed for the base station?

The base station analyses the images the camera pods shoots, 90 images per second times 2 so it’s a lot. It calculates hits on the pods, show the flight in realtime etc. All this takes some grunt to get going. For a laptop the  recommendation is a 4 Core 8 Thread modern computer, for a desktop with faster cores a little bit less. The more grunt the better, it will also possibly hold up better to future revisions of the software. Due to lot of factors a complete recommentation is hard to make but a fairly cheap Ryzen 5 laptop should do the job.