PTZ Camera Control App

This app is designed to provide a user interface to control PTZOptics cameras over the network by providing an easy interface to switch between presets for multiple cameras. The app also provides consistent control over various parameters of the camera such as color, exposure, and focus.

Installation

This app can be installed simply with pipx or pip (First you must install Python 3.11+ and pipx):

pipx install ptz-control-app

# To run the app:
ptz-control-app

Architecture

This app is designed as a server application with a Django backend and a React frontend. The backend uses a SQLite database to store camera presets and settings. When run, the ptz-control-app command (a CLI made with click) runs migrations (unless --no-migrations is specified), starts the Django server, and opens the browser to the app (unless --no-browser is specified).

Background

This app was created to support the use of PTZOptics cameras at Suber Road Baptist Church. The previous controller we were using was somewhat cumbersome in certain circumstances, and we regularly had problems with the camera settings automatically adjusting to unreasonable values (like aperture being completely closed or color varying widely between multiple cameras). This app primarily provides an easy mechanism to switch between presets, keeps camera settings consistent week after week, and provides a simple interface to adjust settings while making fine adjustments easy.

Development

The frontend is linked to the backend by running npm run build in the frontend directory and copying the js and css files to static/ptz_app. The npm run watch command will watch for changes and automatically rebuild the frontend and copy the files to the appropriate directory. This enables convenient development of frontend and backend together, but it does not feature live reloading, so when developing the frontend, it is often more convenient to run the frontend with npm run dev, which runs only the frontend and provides live reloading. Note that the contents of App.tsx are evaluated in this case, so whatever page that imports will get shown.