picam

Surveillance Software for the Raspberry Pi.

Features

• Motion detection
• Amazon S3 backed
• Service-orientated architecture using Redis as a poor-man's message bus

Usage

Folow the setup guide below first then navigate to the picam/source folder and chmod +x start to make the start script runnable. Edit settings.json and tweak as necessary. From different console windows, or in background tasks, run the following commands

• ./start uploader
• ./start camera
• ./start busmonitor (not necessary, only used during development)

The uploader listens for 'image-saved' messages and punts them to S3. The camera starts the raspberry pi camera and starts taking photos in-memory. These are analysed and if reasonably different from the last saved to disk and an 'image-saved' message published on the bus. The busmonitor displays all bus messages in the console to help with development.

Setup

git clone git@github.com:rba100/picam.git picam
cd picam

Install python dependencies

sudo pip install -r requirements.txt
sudo apt-get install python3-picamera
sudo aptitude install python-imaging-tk
sudo pip3 install redis

Configure Amazon credentials

As per http://boto3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/configuration.html

~/.aws/credentials
~/.aws/config

Intall Redis

Redis is used just to pass messages between services. It's rubbish, because messages are lost when consumers are offline. It's no RabbitMQ.

Building and installing it is tiresome, but not very hard at all. The steps below I found here: http://mjavery.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/setting-up-redis-on-raspberry-pi.html

wget http://download.redis.io/redis-stable.tar.gz
tar xvzf redis-stable.tar.gz
cd redis-stable
make
cd src
sudo cp redis-server /usr/local/bin
sudo cp redis-cli /usr/local/bin
sudo mkdir /etc/redis
sudo mkdir /var/redis
sudo cp utils/redis_init_script /etc/init.d/redis_6379
sudo cp redis.conf /etc/redis/6379.conf
sudo mkdir /var/redis/6379

Edit the configuration file

sudo vim /etc/redis/6379.conf

Changing

• daemonize to yes
• pidfile to /var/run/redis_6379.pid
• loglevel to notice
• dir to /var/redis/6379

Configure autostart

sudo update-rc.d redis_6379 defaults
sudo update-rc.d redis_6379 start 20 2 3 4 5 . stop 80 0 1 6 .

Appendix

• python Redis library: https://github.com/andymccurdy/redis-py
• python picamera library: http://picamera.readthedocs.io/en/release-1.12/
• pyton image library: https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/4.0.x/