Software setup pc

Setting up the Pi Gazing software on a Linux PC

This page lists the steps we follow to set up the Pi Gazing software on a desktop PC or laptop.

There are two reasons why you might want to do this:

• You might be planning to plug your Pi Gazing camera into your PC, and use your PC to analyse the video stream (instead of a Raspberry Pi).

• You might be planning to use your PC as a central repository for your observations. In this case, you will have a Raspberry Pi controlling your camera, but you will set this to upload its observations to your PC each day, where you will find the web interface is a lot more responsive.

In both cases, the set up installations are very similar.

Getting started

The steps below assume that you are running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. In this case, we have an automated script which installs all of the packages that you require. The steps will be almost identical on any other version of Ubuntu or Debian, though but package names will be slightly different. In this case, you will need to work through the script install.sh, manually running the commands, and making changes as required.

Since Pi Gazing requires the installation of a large number of software packages from the Ubuntu package repository, including setting up an Apache web server, you may want to consider running Pi Gazing on a virtual machine, for example using VirtualBox. This means that the installation process will not interfere with any software you already have installed.

Fetch the Pi Gazing source code

First, you need to install git in order to fetch the Pi Gazing source code:

sudo apt-get -y install git

You can then fetch the Pi Gazing source code as follows:

git clone https://github.com/dcf21/pi-gazing.git

Configure your installation

Before you start, you need to provide some details about your Pi Gazing installation.

The file pi-gazing/configuration_local/installation_settings.conf contains a list of settings which describe your set up. It is important that you go through and set all of these. More information about these settings can be found here.

If you plan to use this Pi Gazing installation to make observations, you must configure your installation's latitude and longitude, your installation's name and unique ID, the model of camera and lens that you are using. More details about this can be found on our software configuration page.

If you are only planning to use this installation as a repository, you can leave these settings unconfigured. You may still want to set your repository to export observations to an external server.

Build the Pi Gazing code, and install dependent software

You are now ready to build the Pi Gazing software. This step may take around 6 hours on a Raspberry Pi, but typically takes more like 1-2 hours on a modern PC.

cd pi-gazing
./install.sh