DIY Wireless Touchscreen Cinema Camera Controller

How to build your own wireless touchscreen cinema camera controller, or at least how I made the first version of a DIY simple settings controller for my Z Cam cinema camera that suited my needs at the time.

The intention of this write up is so that you can treat it like a one time KiwiCo Crate build focused for filmmakers. Although the software side did need some basic knowledge, I document everything I did, and was able to reproduce my results twice by following the instructions.

Hardware

Parts List

Preliminary parts list for DIY tinkerers comes out to around $150 all with 1-2 day shipping in the US at the time of writing the first draft of instructions.

• ~50$ Raspberry Pi 3b (Supplier 1) (Supplier 2) (Supplier 3) and some STL reference designs
• ~25$ 18650 UPS with relevant Docs
• ~40$ 4.3" Waveshare with relevant Docs
• ~25$ 18650 Batteries with charger or 18650 with 4 Bay Charger I just used 2 from an old Portkeys Keygrip
• ~10$ Micro SD Card 16GB Industrial or 64GB Sandisk Extreme or any spare you have laying around, the pi 3 doesn't have high read and write speed needs.
• 3D Printed Case - the design we had made can be found for for free on my Ko-fi but does need 4 M2.5x8mm Screws.
• Ethernet cable for connecting Pi to ssh in

If you don't own a 3D printer or have a friend that will lend you time on theirs, then someplace like PCBWay only costs 8$ a part for PETG and roughly double for Nylon. So at most it's a $200 project that takes a few days for parts to arrive.

Parts Models

3D Models of all parts can be found in 3D models folder on the Github Repo

Hardware Notes

We will be waiting to assemble all the hardware until after preparing the OS, but it is possible to insert the micro SD card if the hardware stack is assembled, just use extreme care.

We selected a Pi 3 due to the low power power demands, however when designing our case, we made it compatible with Raspberry pi 3 through 5 port cutouts.

Software

Preparing the OS

On Raspberry Pi Imager select Pi 3 and choose the recommended Legacy 32 bit desktop environment, then select your storage and click next

General Tab

1. hostname can be any, its used for identifying this device on your local network when you plug it into ethernet
2. Username and password can be any for this, default for raspian is user pi password raspberry
3. Configure WLAN
   1. Enter ZCAM SSID

      ZCAM-F8-###### (can be found on networking menu in camera)

   2. Password - default z cam wifi password is 12345678
   3. Set wireless lan country (Most important step)
4. Set locale for timezone and keyboard layout

Services Tabs

be sure to check enable ssh and password authentication, which will match the username and password you made in the general tab

Options Tab

All optional, I prefer the alert when its done being burned and disable telemetry.

Click to confirm the settings are applied to the OS.

Wait a bit for the OS to write and verify.

Insert SD card into the Pi 3

Assemble the hardware stack

First time boot

turn on ups

• blue screen to generate ssh
• reboots automagically
• welcome to pi screen with text on the bottom.

1st boot may take a while and seem like its stopped, that's normal

Once you're on the desktop screen plug in your ethernet to your pi.

ssh in with the user account you created

To ssh in windows Powershell

1. Launch Windows Powershell
2. ssh [email protected]

from my example picture earlier it would be ssh [email protected]

3. yes to fingerprint if needed
4. enter USER password

these are all the setting you set while preparing the OS image in the general tab

sudo apt update


sudo apt upgrade

y to continue

sudo reboot now

we are now up to date for raspberry pi os but lack all the dependencies we need to run our custom software

Node Install

SSH in after the reboot

Using this as my current reference

A note to new tinkerers, I cite my source here because you should NEVER curl | bash without knowing what the script does, in this case it is how the official documentation distributes it, and so generally safe to do so.

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.7/install.sh | bash

use new ssh connection

nvm install 20

Install the programs needed

sudo apt-get -y install unclutter firefox-esr 

enable i2c

sudo raspi-config	

interface options --> I2c select --> Finish

npm install -g yarn

Copy the open source software from our Github Repo

git clone https://github.com/brollbanter/cinema-camera-controller.git c3	

the c3 at the end places the files from our repo into a directory called c3 on your device. This is mainly so we don't have to type cinema-camera-controller and keeps the folder names cleaner. It is also used in scripts our program uses

cd c3/software

yarn install

create camera_state.json

nano camera_state.json 

Paste the following and write out and exit {"wifi":"connected","wifi_ssid":"any","camera_url":"http://10.98.33.1"}

make sure z cam is on at this point if you plan on connecting to test

cd ~/c3/software/desktop

cp start_server.desktop start_ui.desktop ~/Desktop/

copies the two pre-made desktop shortcuts to the Desktop

nano ~/Desktop/start_server.desktop

Change USER to your pi install's username and write out

nano ~/Desktop/start_ui.desktop

Again change USER to your pi install's username and write out

Now you have a Raspberry Pi 3 desktop environment with 2 shortcuts, 1 to start the server and another to start the UI. Be sure to always start the server before the UI. The safest way to shutdown is to exit the UI through the gear cog, navigate to the Pi OS logo then tap Shutdown. Click shutdown again to confirm and wait for the green Pi activity LED to stop flashing, then turn the UPS off.