Setting Up My Raspberry Pi And A Logitech C270 Webcam 14481n
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Setting up my Raspberry Pi and a Logitech C270 webcam Categories: OpenCV, Raspberry by Yusro February 24, 2013
From : http://www.bluemoonblog.co.uk/ I’m planning to do some high altitude photography with my Raspberry Pi, webcam, and GPS soon. (but that’s another story) And ing the nightmare I had setting up my Raspberry Pi and C270 Logitech webcam, I thought it was about time I shared how I did it. These instructions are very simple an should hopefully save you some trial and error. Importantly, thanks must go to Insipid Ramblings and Hexxeh for their information and work that helped me get this far. I’m using Raspbian Wheezy Distro (2013-02-09), so if you’re using another Linux OS, your results may vary depending on what version you use. However, I am assuming that you have already installed a Raspbian image, and can successfully boot to the desktop. So plug in your C270 Logitech webcam, and we’ll get started. 1. Add UVC to the image and run rpi-update as described here. This will update your image to include the initially-missing UVC . Reboot as suggested. 2. Update your packages sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade 3. Install the guvcview webcam viewer sudo apt-get install guvcview 4. Set up your permissions and enable the driver
sudo mod -a -G video pi sudo modprobe uvcvideo Reboot the Raspberry Pi. 5. To view the webcam image just run guvcview There are a few things to keep in mind, the webcam must be connected before powering up the Raspberry Pi. If not you need to run sudo rmmod uvcvideo and sudo modprobe uvcvideo before it will work. Hopefully this how-to helps you out and if you have more luck than I using a mouse and/or higher resolutions please let me know in the comments.
Related Posts
May 24, 2013 -- Using a webcam with the Raspberry Pi From : http://stevenhickson.blogspot.fr/ ...
April 1, 2013 -- Basic Image Processing on Raspberry Pi From : http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ Image Pi...
March 15, 2013 -- Basic Instructions on Raspberry Pi From : http://www.neil-black.co.uk/ Righ...
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Raspberry Pi – Webcam streaming 54 This entry was posted in Raspberry Pi and tagged C270 Creative fswebcam HowTo
Logitech mjpg mjpg-streamer mjpg_streamer motion Raspbian RPi Stream Surveillance TImelapse Tutorial VF0260 Webcam on September 26, 2012 by SLB
Now it’s time to make my old Creative Live! Cam Vista IM (VF0260) Webcam work on the RasPi, I also tried a new Logitech C270 HD Webcam and they both work flawlessly out of the box. I have tried three softwares for the webcam, which I previously tested on my desktop machine running Fedora and I wanted to try them also on the Pi. These are:
fswebcam
motion
mjpeg-streamer
Let’s now have a look at them. Note: Since some kernel updates, it’s required to boot the system with a kernel parameter that lets the webcam work again instead of taking just black pictures. Thanks to WebS1821 for this precious insight! Proceed by editing the kernel parameters file: # nano /boot/cmdline.txt
and append:
dwc_otg.fiq_split_enable=0
Don’t forget to reboot after adding the parameter.
fswebcam: fswebcam is the simplest and easiest way to have your webcam capture single frames, also programmatically at a specified timer interval. Of course it’s also possible to call fswebcam from a bash script anytime it’s required, but this is another story. To install fswebcam simply run: # apt-get install fswebcam
One of the nice features of fswebcam is that it’s possible to add a footer to the capture, where you can specify your text of choice. For instance, this is the command I ran fswebcam with: $ fswebcam -r 640x480 -S 15 --flip h --jpeg 95 --shadow --title "SLB Labs" --subtitle "Home" --info "Monitor: Active @ 1 fpm" --save home.jpg -q -l 60
switches: -r: frame resolution width*height -S: numbers of frame to skip for the webcam to capture a stable and well illuminated frame --flip: frame flipping, in this case horizontal --jpeg: jpeg compression quality --shadow: adds a drop shadow to the footer text --title, --subtitle, --info: different fields of the footer text --save: path and file name where to saved the frame to -q: leaves the process running in background -l: takes a snapshoot every specified number of seconds Many more options are described in the man pages of fswebcam $ man fswebcam
This is the output frame sample given by the previous command:
Okay, this wasn’t exactly streaming, so let’s get into more serious stuff.
motion: motion is a rather complete surveillance system with no fancy stuff and straight to the point, yet very customizable. Among what it can do, it is capable of motion detection, frame recording, video recording, timelapse. Its installation is as simple as usual: # apt-get install motion
It comes with a plain web configuration interface, but first of all we need to specify which port motion will run on. Let’s now edit its configuration file: # nano /etc/motion/motion.conf
and look for the settings webcontrol_port (default 8080) and stream_port (default 8081), which refers to the web configuration interface and the streaming port, respectively. Change them as needed or simply get aware of their default values. To start motion run:
# motion
You can now access to the web configuration interface by pointing your browser to: http://RPI-IP:webcontrol_port
where RPI-IP is the local IP address of your RasPi and webcontrol_port is the same port set in the config file. That said, it’s now possible to browse all the available settings. Some of them that are worth a mention are: width and height: frame dimensions, camera dependent framerate: maximum number of frames to be captured per second threshold: number of pixels in the image that must change to trigger the motion detection quality: compression level for frame capture ffmpeg_timelapse: number of seconds between which to take a frame shoot for timelapse recording ffmpeg_bps: constant bitrate for video encoding (ignored for timelapses) ffmpeg_variable_bitrate: variable bitrate for video encoding (using a variable bitrate is the only way to get decent timelapse videos, this setting is used for both video motion recording and timelapses) and of course the different images/video/timelapses paths where to save the captures to are among the settings you might want to customize. Another important feature of motion is that it’s possible to execute any particular command anytime an event starts and/or a picture is captured, this is achieved by the setting on_event_start and on_picture_save. For instance it’s possible to send an email and the saved picture to an ftp server by setting on_event_start and on_picture_save as follows: on_event_start sendmail -f [email protected] %f
Like said above, the video stream will be available pointing the browser here: http://RPI-IP:stream_port
mjpeg-streamer:
Another streaming software that I tried was mjpeg-streamer, which is not as features complete as motion, but it is perfect if you just need a video stream. It also provides a web interface to display the stream. I couldn’t find a binary version of mjpegstreamer for arm processor, so I had to compile it myself as follows. First off we need mjpg-streamer source code from > here < and save it in your folder of choice. I usually save and extract the source packages under /usr/local/src. Position yourself whichever folder the archive has been saved into, and extract the archive with the command: # tar xvzf mjpg-streamer-r63.tar.gz
In order to compile mjpg-streamer, we need the libjpeg8-dev libraries, so let’s install them first: # apt-get install libjpeg8-dev
I also needed to create a symbolic link of one header file which, to me, resulted missing: # ln -s /usr/include/linux/videodev2.h /usr/include/linux/videodev.h
Now everything should be set to proceed with the compilation process. Switch to mjpg-streamer newly created folder and compile it with: # cd mjpg-streamer-r63 # CFLAGS+="-O2 -march=armv6 -mfpu=vfp -mfloat-abi=hard" make
And that’s it. To run mpjg-streamer type the following command: $ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. $ ./mjpg_streamer -i './input_uvc.so -d /dev/video0 -r 640x480 -f 15' -o './output_http.so -w ./www -p 8080'
switches: -i: configure the input section -d: device selection, in case of multiple webcams -r: frame resolution width*height -f: frame per seconds -o: configure the output section -w: website folder -p: port
It’s now possible to get access to the web interface at the address: http://RPI-IP:8080
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About SLB Computer Science Engineer. I'm @slabua pretty much everywhere. Feel free to check my Google+ profile for more infos: http://plus.google.com/+SalvatoreLaBua View all posts by SLB →
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Using the Raspberry Pi for camera surveillance using Motion and cloud storage Posted on November 19, 2012 by Astroland
February, 16th 2014 A fully updated post using BoxFS2 with oauth2 authentication. The previous version of this post used an old version of BoxFS which is now obsolete because Box.com changed their API. If you are looking for a cheap camera surveillance setup, the Raspberry Pi is a great solution. It is small, easy to install and, most important, has low energy usage.
I own Model B (see the Raspberry Pi Wikipedia page for detail about the models) which uses 3.5 Watts. There are several open source motion detection applications for Linux such as ZoneMinder and Motion. Both programs are available through the Rasbian repository. ZoneMinder looks like a real security control center with all those nice cam screens, but it’s too bloated and too U heavy for the Raspberry Pi. Motion is more lightweight and doesn’t stress the U too much when processing 320×200 camera data. With 2 IP camera’s my average load is less than 0.50 on my RasPi, which also serves as an caching DNS server. For storage of the AVI video files which contain the captured motion frames, I use a free Box.com . Box.com provides the same service as the popular Dropbox. The reason for choosing Box.com is because Dropbox has no open source client. The Dropbox Linux client is closed source and has, at the moment, no for ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi. Furthermore the free Box.com gives you 10 GB of free storage. Way enough to store home camera data for a couple of months. BoxFS2 is the weapon of choice to mount your Box.com as a drive partition on your Raspberry Pi. Some basic Linux knowledge is preferred. Setting up BoxFS2 First, read the REE file on the BoxFS2 site carefully for the needed dependencies Install the needed libraries from the command prompt: sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libfuse-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev
Besides some libraries from the Raspbian repository, you’ll also need libapp and libjson. Get the latest commits from boxfs2, libapp and libjson:
git clone https://github.com/drotiro/boxfs2.git git clone https://github.com/drotiro/libapp.git git clone https://github.com/vincenthz/libjson.git
Compile libapp first, then libjson and boxfs2 last using make and sudo make install. After installing make sure you run the command ldconfig to update links to the libraries for the operating system. Forgetting this might give you some error messages about not found libraries. The BoxFS2 binary will be installed in /usr/local/bin. Creating a BoxFS2 config file With the command boxfs-init you can create a config file for BoxFS2. The configuration file will be placed in the directory .boxfs2. Open an editor and the configuration file would look something like this: # Conf file for boxfs # edit to fit your needs. # Put oauth2 tokens here: token_file = /home/pi/.boxfs/token
# Set a valid mount point mountpoint = /home/pi/box.com verbose = no largefiles = no # Configure the cache cache_dir = /home/pi/.boxfs/cache expire_time = 1440 # Configure your uid and gid below: uid = 1000 gid = 1000 fperm = 644
dperm = 755
The mountpoint must be provided in either way. This can be an empty directory called /motion for example. Also check the id (uid) and the group id (gid) of the you are using. You can check this in the wd file which is located in /etc. In my case I’m using pi which has id 1000 and group id 1000. To let Boxfs2 run as a non-root you have to add your to the fuse group: sudo gwd -a fuse
If you won’t do this, the following error message will be shown: fuse: failed to open /dev/fuse: Permission denied
Also the execute bit of the fmount binary should be set: sudo chmod +x /bin/fmount
Forgetting this will cause mounting to fail with this error message: fuse: failed to exec fmount: Permission denied
Mounting your Box.com using BoxFS To start the BoxFS2 client, simply run this command from the home directory of your Box.com : boxfs -f .boxfs/boxfs.cfg The first time you run boxfs, you will need to complete the authentication (oauth2) process and grant access to your box.com . It’s easy, just follow the instructions on the terminal and on your browser. When the mount is successful, set the right permissions with the command chmod -r 755 <mountpoint>.
To check if everything is doing what it should be doing, go to your BoxFS mount point and try to create or copy some files. For debugging I recommend to be logged in to your Box.com with your browser to see if things are actually written in to the cloud storage. Installing and configuring Motion To install Motion just run this command: sudo apt-get install motion
Be sure that your camera’s and/or webcams output a 320×200 (or 240) image and Motion is configured with the same resolution. I’ve tried a resolution like 640×400 pixels, but the U load went sky high on the RasPi, so I’ve settled for a lower resolution. The images generated by my camera’s are quite clear and useful, so I’m happy. I have no experience over clocking the Pi in combination with Motion, but if you do, please share your findings in the comments. Same goes for solving the above resolution problem Further configuring Motion is something you have to do on your own. The on line manual is quite clear about the numerous settings which can be done. Mailing an image snapshot or a simple message when motion is detected is just one of the many possibilities. Oh, and don’t forget to set the path to your BoxFS2 mount point to store your videos When you’ve got an mobile device, you can use the Box.com app to an AVI file and watch it using a movie player which s the file format. Great when you’re on holiday for example, and want to know what’s going on at home. And all of this without tampering your firewall, keeping your home network closed and secure. I hope this post helps you to set up your own budget camera surveillance system. For less than 180 euro (that’s 2 decent IP camera’s and a RasPi) you’re all set to go. This entry was posted in Raspberry Pi and tagged cloud storage, motion detection, raspberry pi. Bookmark the permalink.
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28 Responses to Using the Raspberry Pi for camera surveillance using Motion and cloud storage 1.
Visperas says: November 28, 2012 at 13:42
Hi, thanks for the article. One question, how to configure the system on and off?. Whe you leave home and arrive … Thanks Reply
2.
Astroland says: November 28, 2012 at 20:42
Hi Visperas, On the Motion website you can read about the built in http interface: http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/RemoteControlHttp With a simple call from a browser, you can set (for example) motion detection on or off. So when you’re about to leave the house you call a bookmarked webpage on your smartphone to start motion detection. Reply
3.
sco Marti says: December 3, 2012 at 19:05
Hi Astroland! Thank’s very much….it’s all i need! it’s only a few months that I use linux and raspberry. But already fascinated … I mounted the webcam on debiam wheezy and all is ok ….on the local memory. Please, ….could you make a step by step tutorial for setup boxfs. I do not know where to begin: i don’t know how compile libeapp…and create config file. Thanks Reply
Shotca says:
February 20, 2013 at 23:23
It’s all here: http://code.google.com/p/boxfs/wiki/Compiling. See also the comment by skou… @gmail.com. Reply
4.
Don Robertito says: January 21, 2013 at 15:52
Hi! Thank you for this tutorial, it was very helpful to me, but the my main project is not exactly this. And this is why I’m asking you: How can you access the mounted boxfs directory on vnc without root permissions on GUI? Thanks: Robert Reply
Astroland says:
January 22, 2013 at 21:51
Hello Robert
Why don’t you connect using ssh? I don’t understand why you should connect a directory using a remote desktop utility. Reply
5.
Jim says: February 22, 2013 at 22:43
Thanks, this looks like what I need. I’m planning on using an older android phone (wifi only) as a IP camera. I tried this setup with zoneminder but performance on the pi was very poor. I’m goning to try a few more tweaks in before I give up and try motion instead. But this is good info and I didn’t think of using boxFS. Reply
6.
Antonio Pilla says: March 26, 2013 at 00:08
Hi astroland, thanks for the tutorial. A question: why if I the webcam at http://ipwebcam:8081 I don’t see the but receive a poup with “do you want to save this file, or find a program online to open it? Thanks in advance Reply
Astroland says:
March 26, 2013 at 09:53
Hi Antonio, The Motion webserver outputs an MJPEG (Motion JPEG) video stream. Looking at the message you get, you are using Internet Explorer which does not MJPEG. Therefor it asks to use a program which can display a MJPEG stream. Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari MJPEG without installing any extra programs. On the Motion website you can find some other solutions to display a MJPEG stream if you want
to stick with Internet Explorer: http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebcamServer Reply
Antonio Pilla says:
March 27, 2013 at 23:22
Thanks very much Reply
7.
Rich says: April 3, 2013 at 11:52
Thanks for the article, Astroland. I’ve been trying to set Motion up on my Pi for a few weeks now, and have got it to work initially but it invariably terminates after about 5-10 minutes. I’ve tried low resolutions, have moved the camera (Logitech C270 – bought especially because it said ed on the R-Pi compatibility list) to a powered USB hub. The best I’ve managed so far is a tiny 176×144 image size (I was hoping to use at least 640×480, and the camera says it s 1280×960 at 30fps with MJPEG/MJPG ‘pixel format’) and it stayed up for 30 minutes before crashing out with some watchdog timeout error and a nongraceful restart:
Apr 1 21:51:28 raspberrypi motion: [1] Started stream webcam server in port 8081 Apr 1 22:20:17 raspberrypi motion: [0] Thread 1 - Watchdog timeout, trying to do a graceful restart Apr 1 22:20:17 raspberrypi motion: [0] httpd Closing Apr 1 22:20:17 raspberrypi motion: [0] httpd thread exit Apr 1 22:21:17 raspberrypi motion: [0] Thread 1 - Watchdog timeout, did NOT restart graceful,killing it! Apr 1 22:21:17 raspberrypi motion: [0] Calling vid_close() from motion_cleanup Apr 1 22:21:17 raspberrypi motion: [0] Closing video device /dev/video0
Any ideas how I can get this working continuously? I’m using ‘Linux raspberrypi 3.6.11+ #397 PREEMPT’ if that’s any use, and I’ve done update/upgrade? Reply
Astroland says:
April 3, 2013 at 19:41
This seems to be a specific Logitech problem in combination with the Pi running Motion. I did some googling and found on the Raspberry Pi forum s with a similar problem you’re having. If you scroll all the way down in that thread, you can read some solutions/workarounds given by forum s ahynes1 and johnsonfamily38. You have to fiddle around with the palette MJPEG is using. Don’t know if it works but it is worth a try. Reply
Rich says:
April 9, 2013 at 16:04
Hi Astroland – thanks for your reply. My camera won’t work with motion if I pick MJPEG as the palette so I’m using YUYV at the moment. To hack it to work at the moment I’m using 320×240 resolution with about 2 frames a second if I’m lucky. I’ve written a script (based on this: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/12075/best-wayto-follow-a-log-and-execute-a-command-when-some-text-appears-in-the-log) that monitors /var/log/.log and when it sees the watchdog timer giving up it restarts the motion service. This seems to keep things working (although I’ll have blind spots during restarts, of course), and it seems to be restarting between every 10–20 minutes on my Pi. Not ideal but at least it sort of works. Apparently the USB people at Raspberry Pi are working on the USB drivers so maybe some improvements will come along (although at the moment, rpi-update bricks my SD cards each time and the file rename trick doesn’t seem to fix it so I end up having to re-image the SD card each time I try it, so I can’t try any of the latest updates.)
I was assuming/hoping all this would basically just work by now on Linux so it’s all rather disappointing when these cameras work flawlessly at 30fps without crashes on Windows… 8-( Reply
8.
Ben says: May 29, 2013 at 18:01
Hi Astroland, Thanks for the article. I have compiled and installed boxfs on my pi. And I am able to mount my directory to box using boxfs -u [email protected] -U 1000 -G 1000 -F 644 -D 755 -v /home/motion. The problem is that I am not able to write to /home/motion using my “pi” after it is mounted. And I can only create a new file in /home/motion as root. drwxr-xr-x 2 motion motion 0 Jan 1 1970 motion Any ideas? Many thanks. Reply
Astroland says:
May 30, 2013 at 11:31
Hi Ben I see your /home/motion directory has the owner motion and the group motion. Your boxfs command line uses id 1000 and group id 1000. These belong to the pi. Try to find the correct id and group id for the motion in /etc/wd and use these in the boxfs commandline. Hope this helps. Reply
Ben says:
May 30, 2013 at 17:48
Hello Astroland, Thanks for the reply. The problem is that only the root is only to write to the directory after boxfs mounted. Thanks. Reply
Astroland says:
May 30, 2013 at 19:32
Hi Ben Yes, I understand your problem. Have you tried the possible solution in my previous reply? In your boxfs commandline you use the uid and gid of pi while you want to write as motion. That’s giving you the problem. root can read/write (almost) everywhere on a filesystem, so that’s understandable in your situation. Reply
Ben says:
June 4, 2013 at 14:57
Hi Astroland, Thanks and I have tried that and it is writing now. But unfortunately, I have a new issue – SD card I/o error. Cheers.
9.
Matolok says: November 6, 2013 at 06:19
Applying UID and GID of motion to boxfs mounting options not helping. motion is not even able to browse mount point. Compiled rev 95 from SVN.
Reply
Astroland says:
November 6, 2013 at 16:55
Have tried chown-ing the mountpoint before mounting? $ sudo chown motion:motion /motion Reply
10.
Matolok says: November 7, 2013 at 03:23
Yes, I did that. Notice time stamp on directory is wrong: as root: drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 19 14:38 mnt drwxr-xr-x 2 motion motion 8 Dec 31 1969 motion drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Oct 4 22:32 opt as motion ( had to give him /bin/sh instead of /bin/false in order to test ): drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 19 14:38 mnt d????????? ? ? ? ? ? motion drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Oct 4 22:32 opt Reply
11.
No Name says: December 19, 2013 at 17:18
BoxFS has been updated to BoxFS2 and moved to GitHub https://github.com/drotiro/boxfs2
It not longer uses the old and depreciated v1 openbox api Reply
12.
Brian says: December 22, 2013 at 15:09
FWIW, I’m having the Exact same issues as Matolok. I’ve also tried (and failed) all solutions offered here. The only thing I notice is that when BoxFS is loaded, it’s root-only access. I did a sloppy ‘fix’ of just running a cronjob to move files as they appear from where motion outputs to the boxfs directory which is working well enough. I’m a fan of K.I.S.S. though, so it’s slightly irritating. Thanks for the blog entry, it has helped me. Reply
Astroland says:
December 24, 2013 at 16:52
I will do a revision of this blog entry soon(ish). In the mean time BoxFS has been updated to BoxFS2 which uses a new API and makes BoxFS (version 1) useless any day now. As an alternative to BoxFS, you can also try davfs2. With davfs2 you also mount to your box.com using box.com’s DAV interface at https://dav.box.com/dav/. davfs2 is in the apt repository, so you can install it with apt-get install davfs2. A proper explaination will be in the mentioned revision but you can also do some research before I post that revised article Reply
13.
Ed says: January 2, 2014 at 14:27
any luck with Pi Noir ? I would like to stack drift-scan images with this imager. Word has it one could use the raw format, and go beyond 10 seconds of imaging. Not sure if the over 10sec. treshold could be used but I do not plan high magnifications anyway. Reply
14.
awosome says: February 5, 2014 at 13:57
would this camera work? http://www.wanscam.com/component/zoo/item/indoor-wirelessp2p-wifi-ip-camera-mini.html?category_id=2 Reply
Astroland says:
February 6, 2014 at 14:13
It seems like Wanscam IP cameras are rebranded Foscam cameras. Foscam cameras have proven to work with Motion: http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WorkingDevices#Foscam Also the Wanscam camera s MJPEG (Motion JPEG) according to the product page, so a big chance it works but don’t pin me down on that Reply
15.
Jose Brandao says: October 31, 2014 at 03:08
Thank you for this tutorial,.. and is up-to-date… Tx dude Reply
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From : http://www.bluemoonblog.co.uk/ I’m planning to do some high altitude photography with my Raspberry Pi, webcam, and GPS soon. (but that’s another story) And ing the nightmare I had setting up my Raspberry Pi and C270 Logitech webcam, I thought it was about time I shared how I did it. These instructions are very simple an should hopefully save you some trial and error. Importantly, thanks must go to Insipid Ramblings and Hexxeh for their information and work that helped me get this far. I’m using Raspbian Wheezy Distro (2013-02-09), so if you’re using another Linux OS, your results may vary depending on what version you use. However, I am assuming that you have already installed a Raspbian image, and can successfully boot to the desktop. So plug in your C270 Logitech webcam, and we’ll get started. 1. Add UVC to the image and run rpi-update as described here. This will update your image to include the initially-missing UVC . Reboot as suggested. 2. Update your packages sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade 3. Install the guvcview webcam viewer sudo apt-get install guvcview 4. Set up your permissions and enable the driver
sudo mod -a -G video pi sudo modprobe uvcvideo Reboot the Raspberry Pi. 5. To view the webcam image just run guvcview There are a few things to keep in mind, the webcam must be connected before powering up the Raspberry Pi. If not you need to run sudo rmmod uvcvideo and sudo modprobe uvcvideo before it will work. Hopefully this how-to helps you out and if you have more luck than I using a mouse and/or higher resolutions please let me know in the comments.
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Raspberry Pi – Webcam streaming 54 This entry was posted in Raspberry Pi and tagged C270 Creative fswebcam HowTo
Logitech mjpg mjpg-streamer mjpg_streamer motion Raspbian RPi Stream Surveillance TImelapse Tutorial VF0260 Webcam on September 26, 2012 by SLB
Now it’s time to make my old Creative Live! Cam Vista IM (VF0260) Webcam work on the RasPi, I also tried a new Logitech C270 HD Webcam and they both work flawlessly out of the box. I have tried three softwares for the webcam, which I previously tested on my desktop machine running Fedora and I wanted to try them also on the Pi. These are:
fswebcam
motion
mjpeg-streamer
Let’s now have a look at them. Note: Since some kernel updates, it’s required to boot the system with a kernel parameter that lets the webcam work again instead of taking just black pictures. Thanks to WebS1821 for this precious insight! Proceed by editing the kernel parameters file: # nano /boot/cmdline.txt
and append:
dwc_otg.fiq_split_enable=0
Don’t forget to reboot after adding the parameter.
fswebcam: fswebcam is the simplest and easiest way to have your webcam capture single frames, also programmatically at a specified timer interval. Of course it’s also possible to call fswebcam from a bash script anytime it’s required, but this is another story. To install fswebcam simply run: # apt-get install fswebcam
One of the nice features of fswebcam is that it’s possible to add a footer to the capture, where you can specify your text of choice. For instance, this is the command I ran fswebcam with: $ fswebcam -r 640x480 -S 15 --flip h --jpeg 95 --shadow --title "SLB Labs" --subtitle "Home" --info "Monitor: Active @ 1 fpm" --save home.jpg -q -l 60
switches: -r: frame resolution width*height -S: numbers of frame to skip for the webcam to capture a stable and well illuminated frame --flip: frame flipping, in this case horizontal --jpeg: jpeg compression quality --shadow: adds a drop shadow to the footer text --title, --subtitle, --info: different fields of the footer text --save: path and file name where to saved the frame to -q: leaves the process running in background -l: takes a snapshoot every specified number of seconds Many more options are described in the man pages of fswebcam $ man fswebcam
This is the output frame sample given by the previous command:
Okay, this wasn’t exactly streaming, so let’s get into more serious stuff.
motion: motion is a rather complete surveillance system with no fancy stuff and straight to the point, yet very customizable. Among what it can do, it is capable of motion detection, frame recording, video recording, timelapse. Its installation is as simple as usual: # apt-get install motion
It comes with a plain web configuration interface, but first of all we need to specify which port motion will run on. Let’s now edit its configuration file: # nano /etc/motion/motion.conf
and look for the settings webcontrol_port (default 8080) and stream_port (default 8081), which refers to the web configuration interface and the streaming port, respectively. Change them as needed or simply get aware of their default values. To start motion run:
# motion
You can now access to the web configuration interface by pointing your browser to: http://RPI-IP:webcontrol_port
where RPI-IP is the local IP address of your RasPi and webcontrol_port is the same port set in the config file. That said, it’s now possible to browse all the available settings. Some of them that are worth a mention are: width and height: frame dimensions, camera dependent framerate: maximum number of frames to be captured per second threshold: number of pixels in the image that must change to trigger the motion detection quality: compression level for frame capture ffmpeg_timelapse: number of seconds between which to take a frame shoot for timelapse recording ffmpeg_bps: constant bitrate for video encoding (ignored for timelapses) ffmpeg_variable_bitrate: variable bitrate for video encoding (using a variable bitrate is the only way to get decent timelapse videos, this setting is used for both video motion recording and timelapses) and of course the different images/video/timelapses paths where to save the captures to are among the settings you might want to customize. Another important feature of motion is that it’s possible to execute any particular command anytime an event starts and/or a picture is captured, this is achieved by the setting on_event_start and on_picture_save. For instance it’s possible to send an email and the saved picture to an ftp server by setting on_event_start and on_picture_save as follows: on_event_start sendmail -f [email protected] %f
Like said above, the video stream will be available pointing the browser here: http://RPI-IP:stream_port
mjpeg-streamer:
Another streaming software that I tried was mjpeg-streamer, which is not as features complete as motion, but it is perfect if you just need a video stream. It also provides a web interface to display the stream. I couldn’t find a binary version of mjpegstreamer for arm processor, so I had to compile it myself as follows. First off we need mjpg-streamer source code from > here < and save it in your folder of choice. I usually save and extract the source packages under /usr/local/src. Position yourself whichever folder the archive has been saved into, and extract the archive with the command: # tar xvzf mjpg-streamer-r63.tar.gz
In order to compile mjpg-streamer, we need the libjpeg8-dev libraries, so let’s install them first: # apt-get install libjpeg8-dev
I also needed to create a symbolic link of one header file which, to me, resulted missing: # ln -s /usr/include/linux/videodev2.h /usr/include/linux/videodev.h
Now everything should be set to proceed with the compilation process. Switch to mjpg-streamer newly created folder and compile it with: # cd mjpg-streamer-r63 # CFLAGS+="-O2 -march=armv6 -mfpu=vfp -mfloat-abi=hard" make
And that’s it. To run mpjg-streamer type the following command: $ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. $ ./mjpg_streamer -i './input_uvc.so -d /dev/video0 -r 640x480 -f 15' -o './output_http.so -w ./www -p 8080'
switches: -i: configure the input section -d: device selection, in case of multiple webcams -r: frame resolution width*height -f: frame per seconds -o: configure the output section -w: website folder -p: port
It’s now possible to get access to the web interface at the address: http://RPI-IP:8080
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Using the Raspberry Pi for camera surveillance using Motion and cloud storage Posted on November 19, 2012 by Astroland
February, 16th 2014 A fully updated post using BoxFS2 with oauth2 authentication. The previous version of this post used an old version of BoxFS which is now obsolete because Box.com changed their API. If you are looking for a cheap camera surveillance setup, the Raspberry Pi is a great solution. It is small, easy to install and, most important, has low energy usage.
I own Model B (see the Raspberry Pi Wikipedia page for detail about the models) which uses 3.5 Watts. There are several open source motion detection applications for Linux such as ZoneMinder and Motion. Both programs are available through the Rasbian repository. ZoneMinder looks like a real security control center with all those nice cam screens, but it’s too bloated and too U heavy for the Raspberry Pi. Motion is more lightweight and doesn’t stress the U too much when processing 320×200 camera data. With 2 IP camera’s my average load is less than 0.50 on my RasPi, which also serves as an caching DNS server. For storage of the AVI video files which contain the captured motion frames, I use a free Box.com . Box.com provides the same service as the popular Dropbox. The reason for choosing Box.com is because Dropbox has no open source client. The Dropbox Linux client is closed source and has, at the moment, no for ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi. Furthermore the free Box.com gives you 10 GB of free storage. Way enough to store home camera data for a couple of months. BoxFS2 is the weapon of choice to mount your Box.com as a drive partition on your Raspberry Pi. Some basic Linux knowledge is preferred. Setting up BoxFS2 First, read the REE file on the BoxFS2 site carefully for the needed dependencies Install the needed libraries from the command prompt: sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libfuse-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev
Besides some libraries from the Raspbian repository, you’ll also need libapp and libjson. Get the latest commits from boxfs2, libapp and libjson:
git clone https://github.com/drotiro/boxfs2.git git clone https://github.com/drotiro/libapp.git git clone https://github.com/vincenthz/libjson.git
Compile libapp first, then libjson and boxfs2 last using make and sudo make install. After installing make sure you run the command ldconfig to update links to the libraries for the operating system. Forgetting this might give you some error messages about not found libraries. The BoxFS2 binary will be installed in /usr/local/bin. Creating a BoxFS2 config file With the command boxfs-init you can create a config file for BoxFS2. The configuration file will be placed in the directory .boxfs2. Open an editor and the configuration file would look something like this: # Conf file for boxfs # edit to fit your needs. # Put oauth2 tokens here: token_file = /home/pi/.boxfs/token
# Set a valid mount point mountpoint = /home/pi/box.com verbose = no largefiles = no # Configure the cache cache_dir = /home/pi/.boxfs/cache expire_time = 1440 # Configure your uid and gid below: uid = 1000 gid = 1000 fperm = 644
dperm = 755
The mountpoint must be provided in either way. This can be an empty directory called /motion for example. Also check the id (uid) and the group id (gid) of the you are using. You can check this in the wd file which is located in /etc. In my case I’m using pi which has id 1000 and group id 1000. To let Boxfs2 run as a non-root you have to add your to the fuse group: sudo gwd -a fuse
If you won’t do this, the following error message will be shown: fuse: failed to open /dev/fuse: Permission denied
Also the execute bit of the fmount binary should be set: sudo chmod +x /bin/fmount
Forgetting this will cause mounting to fail with this error message: fuse: failed to exec fmount: Permission denied
Mounting your Box.com using BoxFS To start the BoxFS2 client, simply run this command from the home directory of your Box.com : boxfs -f .boxfs/boxfs.cfg The first time you run boxfs, you will need to complete the authentication (oauth2) process and grant access to your box.com . It’s easy, just follow the instructions on the terminal and on your browser. When the mount is successful, set the right permissions with the command chmod -r 755 <mountpoint>.
To check if everything is doing what it should be doing, go to your BoxFS mount point and try to create or copy some files. For debugging I recommend to be logged in to your Box.com with your browser to see if things are actually written in to the cloud storage. Installing and configuring Motion To install Motion just run this command: sudo apt-get install motion
Be sure that your camera’s and/or webcams output a 320×200 (or 240) image and Motion is configured with the same resolution. I’ve tried a resolution like 640×400 pixels, but the U load went sky high on the RasPi, so I’ve settled for a lower resolution. The images generated by my camera’s are quite clear and useful, so I’m happy. I have no experience over clocking the Pi in combination with Motion, but if you do, please share your findings in the comments. Same goes for solving the above resolution problem Further configuring Motion is something you have to do on your own. The on line manual is quite clear about the numerous settings which can be done. Mailing an image snapshot or a simple message when motion is detected is just one of the many possibilities. Oh, and don’t forget to set the path to your BoxFS2 mount point to store your videos When you’ve got an mobile device, you can use the Box.com app to an AVI file and watch it using a movie player which s the file format. Great when you’re on holiday for example, and want to know what’s going on at home. And all of this without tampering your firewall, keeping your home network closed and secure. I hope this post helps you to set up your own budget camera surveillance system. For less than 180 euro (that’s 2 decent IP camera’s and a RasPi) you’re all set to go. This entry was posted in Raspberry Pi and tagged cloud storage, motion detection, raspberry pi. Bookmark the permalink.
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28 Responses to Using the Raspberry Pi for camera surveillance using Motion and cloud storage 1.
Visperas says: November 28, 2012 at 13:42
Hi, thanks for the article. One question, how to configure the system on and off?. Whe you leave home and arrive … Thanks Reply
2.
Astroland says: November 28, 2012 at 20:42
Hi Visperas, On the Motion website you can read about the built in http interface: http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/RemoteControlHttp With a simple call from a browser, you can set (for example) motion detection on or off. So when you’re about to leave the house you call a bookmarked webpage on your smartphone to start motion detection. Reply
3.
sco Marti says: December 3, 2012 at 19:05
Hi Astroland! Thank’s very much….it’s all i need! it’s only a few months that I use linux and raspberry. But already fascinated … I mounted the webcam on debiam wheezy and all is ok ….on the local memory. Please, ….could you make a step by step tutorial for setup boxfs. I do not know where to begin: i don’t know how compile libeapp…and create config file. Thanks Reply
Shotca says:
February 20, 2013 at 23:23
It’s all here: http://code.google.com/p/boxfs/wiki/Compiling. See also the comment by skou… @gmail.com. Reply
4.
Don Robertito says: January 21, 2013 at 15:52
Hi! Thank you for this tutorial, it was very helpful to me, but the my main project is not exactly this. And this is why I’m asking you: How can you access the mounted boxfs directory on vnc without root permissions on GUI? Thanks: Robert Reply
Astroland says:
January 22, 2013 at 21:51
Hello Robert
Why don’t you connect using ssh? I don’t understand why you should connect a directory using a remote desktop utility. Reply
5.
Jim says: February 22, 2013 at 22:43
Thanks, this looks like what I need. I’m planning on using an older android phone (wifi only) as a IP camera. I tried this setup with zoneminder but performance on the pi was very poor. I’m goning to try a few more tweaks in before I give up and try motion instead. But this is good info and I didn’t think of using boxFS. Reply
6.
Antonio Pilla says: March 26, 2013 at 00:08
Hi astroland, thanks for the tutorial. A question: why if I the webcam at http://ipwebcam:8081 I don’t see the but receive a poup with “do you want to save this file, or find a program online to open it? Thanks in advance Reply
Astroland says:
March 26, 2013 at 09:53
Hi Antonio, The Motion webserver outputs an MJPEG (Motion JPEG) video stream. Looking at the message you get, you are using Internet Explorer which does not MJPEG. Therefor it asks to use a program which can display a MJPEG stream. Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari MJPEG without installing any extra programs. On the Motion website you can find some other solutions to display a MJPEG stream if you want
to stick with Internet Explorer: http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebcamServer Reply
Antonio Pilla says:
March 27, 2013 at 23:22
Thanks very much Reply
7.
Rich says: April 3, 2013 at 11:52
Thanks for the article, Astroland. I’ve been trying to set Motion up on my Pi for a few weeks now, and have got it to work initially but it invariably terminates after about 5-10 minutes. I’ve tried low resolutions, have moved the camera (Logitech C270 – bought especially because it said ed on the R-Pi compatibility list) to a powered USB hub. The best I’ve managed so far is a tiny 176×144 image size (I was hoping to use at least 640×480, and the camera says it s 1280×960 at 30fps with MJPEG/MJPG ‘pixel format’) and it stayed up for 30 minutes before crashing out with some watchdog timeout error and a nongraceful restart:
Apr 1 21:51:28 raspberrypi motion: [1] Started stream webcam server in port 8081 Apr 1 22:20:17 raspberrypi motion: [0] Thread 1 - Watchdog timeout, trying to do a graceful restart Apr 1 22:20:17 raspberrypi motion: [0] httpd Closing Apr 1 22:20:17 raspberrypi motion: [0] httpd thread exit Apr 1 22:21:17 raspberrypi motion: [0] Thread 1 - Watchdog timeout, did NOT restart graceful,killing it! Apr 1 22:21:17 raspberrypi motion: [0] Calling vid_close() from motion_cleanup Apr 1 22:21:17 raspberrypi motion: [0] Closing video device /dev/video0
Any ideas how I can get this working continuously? I’m using ‘Linux raspberrypi 3.6.11+ #397 PREEMPT’ if that’s any use, and I’ve done update/upgrade? Reply
Astroland says:
April 3, 2013 at 19:41
This seems to be a specific Logitech problem in combination with the Pi running Motion. I did some googling and found on the Raspberry Pi forum s with a similar problem you’re having. If you scroll all the way down in that thread, you can read some solutions/workarounds given by forum s ahynes1 and johnsonfamily38. You have to fiddle around with the palette MJPEG is using. Don’t know if it works but it is worth a try. Reply
Rich says:
April 9, 2013 at 16:04
Hi Astroland – thanks for your reply. My camera won’t work with motion if I pick MJPEG as the palette so I’m using YUYV at the moment. To hack it to work at the moment I’m using 320×240 resolution with about 2 frames a second if I’m lucky. I’ve written a script (based on this: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/12075/best-wayto-follow-a-log-and-execute-a-command-when-some-text-appears-in-the-log) that monitors /var/log/.log and when it sees the watchdog timer giving up it restarts the motion service. This seems to keep things working (although I’ll have blind spots during restarts, of course), and it seems to be restarting between every 10–20 minutes on my Pi. Not ideal but at least it sort of works. Apparently the USB people at Raspberry Pi are working on the USB drivers so maybe some improvements will come along (although at the moment, rpi-update bricks my SD cards each time and the file rename trick doesn’t seem to fix it so I end up having to re-image the SD card each time I try it, so I can’t try any of the latest updates.)
I was assuming/hoping all this would basically just work by now on Linux so it’s all rather disappointing when these cameras work flawlessly at 30fps without crashes on Windows… 8-( Reply
8.
Ben says: May 29, 2013 at 18:01
Hi Astroland, Thanks for the article. I have compiled and installed boxfs on my pi. And I am able to mount my directory to box using boxfs -u [email protected] -U 1000 -G 1000 -F 644 -D 755 -v /home/motion. The problem is that I am not able to write to /home/motion using my “pi” after it is mounted. And I can only create a new file in /home/motion as root. drwxr-xr-x 2 motion motion 0 Jan 1 1970 motion Any ideas? Many thanks. Reply
Astroland says:
May 30, 2013 at 11:31
Hi Ben I see your /home/motion directory has the owner motion and the group motion. Your boxfs command line uses id 1000 and group id 1000. These belong to the pi. Try to find the correct id and group id for the motion in /etc/wd and use these in the boxfs commandline. Hope this helps. Reply
Ben says:
May 30, 2013 at 17:48
Hello Astroland, Thanks for the reply. The problem is that only the root is only to write to the directory after boxfs mounted. Thanks. Reply
Astroland says:
May 30, 2013 at 19:32
Hi Ben Yes, I understand your problem. Have you tried the possible solution in my previous reply? In your boxfs commandline you use the uid and gid of pi while you want to write as motion. That’s giving you the problem. root can read/write (almost) everywhere on a filesystem, so that’s understandable in your situation. Reply
Ben says:
June 4, 2013 at 14:57
Hi Astroland, Thanks and I have tried that and it is writing now. But unfortunately, I have a new issue – SD card I/o error. Cheers.
9.
Matolok says: November 6, 2013 at 06:19
Applying UID and GID of motion to boxfs mounting options not helping. motion is not even able to browse mount point. Compiled rev 95 from SVN.
Reply
Astroland says:
November 6, 2013 at 16:55
Have tried chown-ing the mountpoint before mounting? $ sudo chown motion:motion /motion Reply
10.
Matolok says: November 7, 2013 at 03:23
Yes, I did that. Notice time stamp on directory is wrong: as root: drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 19 14:38 mnt drwxr-xr-x 2 motion motion 8 Dec 31 1969 motion drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Oct 4 22:32 opt as motion ( had to give him /bin/sh instead of /bin/false in order to test ): drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 19 14:38 mnt d????????? ? ? ? ? ? motion drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Oct 4 22:32 opt Reply
11.
No Name says: December 19, 2013 at 17:18
BoxFS has been updated to BoxFS2 and moved to GitHub https://github.com/drotiro/boxfs2
It not longer uses the old and depreciated v1 openbox api Reply
12.
Brian says: December 22, 2013 at 15:09
FWIW, I’m having the Exact same issues as Matolok. I’ve also tried (and failed) all solutions offered here. The only thing I notice is that when BoxFS is loaded, it’s root-only access. I did a sloppy ‘fix’ of just running a cronjob to move files as they appear from where motion outputs to the boxfs directory which is working well enough. I’m a fan of K.I.S.S. though, so it’s slightly irritating. Thanks for the blog entry, it has helped me. Reply
Astroland says:
December 24, 2013 at 16:52
I will do a revision of this blog entry soon(ish). In the mean time BoxFS has been updated to BoxFS2 which uses a new API and makes BoxFS (version 1) useless any day now. As an alternative to BoxFS, you can also try davfs2. With davfs2 you also mount to your box.com using box.com’s DAV interface at https://dav.box.com/dav/. davfs2 is in the apt repository, so you can install it with apt-get install davfs2. A proper explaination will be in the mentioned revision but you can also do some research before I post that revised article Reply
13.
Ed says: January 2, 2014 at 14:27
any luck with Pi Noir ? I would like to stack drift-scan images with this imager. Word has it one could use the raw format, and go beyond 10 seconds of imaging. Not sure if the over 10sec. treshold could be used but I do not plan high magnifications anyway. Reply
14.
awosome says: February 5, 2014 at 13:57
would this camera work? http://www.wanscam.com/component/zoo/item/indoor-wirelessp2p-wifi-ip-camera-mini.html?category_id=2 Reply
Astroland says:
February 6, 2014 at 14:13
It seems like Wanscam IP cameras are rebranded Foscam cameras. Foscam cameras have proven to work with Motion: http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WorkingDevices#Foscam Also the Wanscam camera s MJPEG (Motion JPEG) according to the product page, so a big chance it works but don’t pin me down on that Reply
15.
Jose Brandao says: October 31, 2014 at 03:08
Thank you for this tutorial,.. and is up-to-date… Tx dude Reply
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