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camp

Another Raspberry Pi camera webserver.

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. SEE #11 FOR MORE.

What it does

Hosts a website where you can view your webcam in real time.

Why I wrote it

There are a lot of tutorials out there on how to turn your pi into a webcam server. Most of them involve installing motion, which works great in many use cases. However, I wanted something simpler. Namely, I wanted:

  • Minimal configuration
  • Password protection
  • One-way streaming
  • Easily customizable webpage
  • Extensible server

camp does just this. Nothing else. This (hopefully) makes it the simplest and fastest option out there.

Installation

Camp uses tornado to create a web server. It can interact with the Pi camera with the aptly named picamera module, or it can use USB webcams with opencv and Pillow. The command below installs both sets of dependencies.

sudo apt-get install python-dev python-pip python-opencv libjpeg-dev
sudo pip install tornado Pillow picamera

Once the dependencies are installed on your pi, you can clone this repository and run the server.

git clone https://github.com/patrickfuller/camp.git
python camp/server.py

Navigate to http://your.r.pi.ip:8000 and check out your webcam.

USB Camera

Use with python server.py --use-usb.

Password

With the --require-login flag, camp will open a login page before allowing webcam access.

The default password is "raspberry". In order to change it, run this in your camp directory:

python -c "import hashlib; import getpass; print(hashlib.sha512(getpass.getpass())).hexdigest()" > password.txt

This will prompt you for a password, encrypt it, and save the result in password.txt.

Note that this level of password protection is basic. It's fine for keeping the occasional stranger out but won't stand up to targeted hacking.

Run on startup

It's nice to have your pi start camp whenever it turns on. Let's make that happen. Type sudo nano /etc/rc.local to open this file for editing, and add the line nohup python /home/pi/camp/server.py & before the last line. Note that you may need to change the path (/home/pi/camp/server.py) to point to the right file.

Customization

The website consists of index.html, login.html, and style.css. These can be edited to change the look of camp.

If you want to add in extra functionality, edit client.js and server.py. The client should send a request to the server, which will then cause the server to do something.

If you want to add in extra camera features, opencv comes with a lot of useful computer vision algorithms. Check out its functionality before writing your own.