Raspberry Pi Roamer Camera

This project was an attempt to create a camera that we could strap to actors, and broadcast it over the internal network.

• Raspberry Pi Roamer Camera
  • Streaming Video
  • Streaming Audio
  • Monitoring the Pi
  • Startup Script

Streaming Video

For streaming video, I went with a generic install of UV4L, with this config file

Here were the exact camera settings we used for our application:

We could then access our stream using this URL:

http://IP OF PI:8080/stream/video.mjpeg

Streaming Audio

Now for the audio streaming: I could not find a better way to do this, and the video and audio were not sync'd. We did not continue this project enough to inject time code.

I ended up using VLC media player:

cvlc -vvv alsa://plughw:2 --sout '#transcode{acodec=mp3,ab=64,channels=1}:standard{access=http,dst=0.0.0.0:8888/out.mp3}' --sout-mux-caching 100 --network-caching 100

Then, we can access our MP3 stream via OBS or VLC:

http://IP OF PI:8888/out.mp3

Monitoring the Pi

This is a NodeJS application I wrote to be able to monitor the PI. You can access the JSON for this page at:

http://IP OF PI:1337/status

{
  "procUptime": 177551,
  "osUptime": 212410,
  "tempature": {
    "c": 33.6,
    "f": 92.48
  },
  "throttledError": [/*A list of error messages will be here*/],
  "ram": {
    "total": 3649,
    "free": 3358,
    "cached": 20,
    "used": 291,
    "percentUsed": 8
  },
  "cpu": {
    "total": 84704,
    "active": 8111,
    "idle": 76593,
    "percentUsed": 34
  },
  "wifi": {
    "error": "/*An error message will be here if wifi fails to init*/",
    "signalLevel": {
        "percent": 100,
        "dBm": -35
    }
  }
}

Error messages:

• Under-voltage!
• ARM frequency capped!
• Currently throttled!
• Soft temperature limit active.
• Under-voltage has occurred since last reboot.
• Throttling has occurred since last reboot.
• ARM frequency capped has occurred since last reboot.
• Soft temperature limit has occurred.

I wrote a simpleish HTML page to display these stats. You can find it here

Startup Script

I created a small startup script that is executed when the PI boots up. You can find it here