Ease of learning: for starters the Raspberry Pi was developed in the UK as a single micro board computer to teach elementary school kids. Been a wild success that escaped into the wild.
The operating system is on a micro memory chip. Video capability is built as well as io ports. You can find the specs on the raspberry pi home page. Basically the yhird party components that add versatility are plug and play with very small driver applets that are downloadable or supplied on chips.
Amazon has both starter books and kits with a variety of add ons. You can use your own monitor and keyboard to do the programming to use downloaded apps or do your own. If a ten year old can get started right out of the gate it must be easy as pie (groaner from the inventers but true)
Popular uses include media center controller, xbox interface, cctv surveillance such as on this example DIY page:
http://www.averagemanvsraspberrypi.com/2014/09/turn-raspberry-pi-into-cctv-security.html
There are many youtube videos sjowing projects that will give you a feel for size and versatility of this little board. It could give you the capability to reconfigure cluster Pi-s and or enclosures and mounts best suited for your job needs. Consider the tiny size of the hd cams used on quad copters as being available to you for on board chip storage or streaming video via wi-fi where you are.
Here’s the mothership url, gateway to forums and user groups. The community is open and very willing to help.
Key is to use the newest generation Rasberry Pi 2 which has a faster cpu as it’s chief advantage among other bennies.
Hope this helps.
It helps a lot!
After reading your post last night, I did a lot of reading/study on the Pi 2. Looks like a lot of fun. I’m still not convinced getting various composite video input to work is going to be doable. There is conflicting info on it. I’ll keep looking at that.
But, if I can get the video in problem worked out, it looks like I can stack a few of these and network them so they’re saving the video files on a single hard drive/sd card/whatever.
And it is small! I’ll need to work out a battery pack/inverter rig so it’ll be independent of any other power source. But that looks doable, too.
So, thanks a lot for the idea. Even if I can’t/don’t do the camera thingy, I’m going to get me a Pi 2 to play around with and learn about.
It’s just going to keep getting more and more flexible as it matures and people come with ideas, gear and apps for it.
C