Battery-powered Raspberry Pi with pan/tilt camera



A portable Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a camera mount that can pan or tilt. The camera is mounted on a non-conductive board as the screw holes actually provide +5V and Gnd for an add-on IR light board. A cheap digital voltmeter is used as a fuel gauge for the battery pack. Rechargeable AA Nimh batteries are used mainly because they are low-cost, available everywhere, and no-hassles with check-in luggage. The 6 x 2450mah IKEA LADDA batteries are excellent value and last 6-7 hours with USB devices, camera and wifi usage. When the fuel gauge shows 6.6V, it's time to recharge. The DC-DC step down converter has the following specs:

Disable the raspbian VNC and install tightvncserver and xrdp instead. Then use Windows Remote Desktop to connect to the Raspberry Pi for a better desktop experience. The Raspberry Pi is configured to boot from a USB flash drive instead of the microSD card for reliability and speed. See link below for more details:

USB mass storage boot

You can toggle the Pi to startup or shutdown by wiring a momentary switch between GPIO3(pin 5) and Ground(pin 6). Add the following line to /boot/config.txt: 
#toggle switch across pins 5-6 for Pi shutdown/startup.
dtoverlay=gpio-shutdown,gpio_pin=3,active_low=1,gpio_pull=up,debounce=1000
ssh to the Pi and take snapshots with the camera using the command: 
raspistill -vf -hf -o snap.jpg
Stream video to a vlc client running on a PC or Android phone. 
raspivid -vf -hf -t 0 -l -o tcp://0.0.0.0:3333      #listen/stream on port 3333
vlc tcp/h264://192.168.1.100:3333                   #open network stream in vlc