rpi-babycam 1.0.0

A video streaming server and motion detector for Raspberry Pi.

Babycam

[!NOTE] This is a fork of RPICamera with some tweaks and additional features.

This package provides a streaming server and motion detection notification service using the Picamera2 library on Raspberry Pi with a camera connected.

Features

• Low latency MJPEG streaming server, perfect for low powered Pis including the Zero.
• Motion detection with configurable sensitivity
• Optional bounding boxes to highlight motion
• Notification hooks including HTTP, MQTT

Use Case

I have tested and used this as a baby monitoring camera, but it could also be used as a simple security camera or even as a wildlife camera.

To-Do

• Fix bounding box error
• Optional reboot and shutdown hooks
• A helper function which logs (to stdout or file) the motion detection values for help with calibrating the sensitivity threshold.
• A generic webhook handler with flexible configuration options
  • A wehbook timeout, so the user doesn't get spammed with notifications for essentially the same event
• Improved performance? Stream is very choppy on a Zero 2 W, an MJPEG server without motion detection is far smoother.
  • use lo-res stream for motion detection and bounding boxes?
• Gracefully handle SIGINT / keyboardinterrupt

Installation

Ensure you have a Raspberry Pi with a camera module.

Install the required dependencies:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y python3-picamera2 python3-pil

Optionally install python3-paho-mqtt if you want to receive notifications that way.

Install the rpi-babycam app:

From PyPi:

pip install rpi-babycam

From Source:

git clone https://codeberg.org/otter_rocket/rpi-babycam
cd rpi-babycam
pip install numpy opencv-python-headless

Additonal Dependencies

The opencv package depends on a bunch of system packages which may or may not already exist on your system. If you get errors such as ImportError: libavformat.so.58: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory, try installing the following packages.

• ffmpeg
• libavformat58
• libswscale
• libatlas-base-dev

Usage

Configuration

Runtime configuration arguments can be set either by an .env file in the same directory from which you run the app, or via cli arguments.

Environment Value	Command Line Argument	Description	Default Value
RECORD_MOTION	--record-motion	Enable circular buffer recording on motion detection.	False
SAVE_PATH	--save-path	Directory to save captured video to, when run with motion recording enabled.	~/Video/rpi-babycam/
BOUNDING_BOX	--bounding-box	Draw bounding box around detected motion.	False
SENSITIVITY	--sensitivity	Set the motion detection sensitivity.	5.0
MQTT_BROKER	--mqtt-broker	MQTT broker address for event publishing.
SERVER_PORT	--port	HTTP Port for streaming server to bind to.	8000
LOG_LEVEL	--log-level	Set the logging level.	WARNING

Running the Application

To start the application, run one of the following commands:

If installed from PyPi: rpi-babycam [options]

If installed from source: python3 babycam/main.py [options]

Automatic Start

For ease of use a systemd service (or similar if you prefer a different init system) can be configured to automatically start rpi-babycam after boot.

To install make a copy of the example service file, make your desired changes, and save it to /home/<user>/.config/systemd/user/. Then

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable rpi-babycam.service
systemctl --user start rpi-babycam.service

Development and Testing

Since the application heavily relies on specific hardware (Raspberry Pi with camera), testing should be conducted on a Raspberry Pi. Ensure that the picamera2 library is correctly installed and configured.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please fork the repository and submit a pull request with your improvements.

License

This project is licensed under the AGPL-3.0 Copyleft license.