Raspberry pi camera servers

This is notes from installation multi-raspberry pi camera (3 or 5 raspberry pi, each with a camera). The camera images is then collected in one single camera server.

This configuration guide is for the raspberry pi cameras and for the single camera server.

Prerequisites

It is assumed that mobotware is compiled for (or on) raspberry, and installed to /usr/local/smr, e.g. from the mobotware directory like this:

cd mobotware
make
sudo make install

Make takes a long time (one hour or so).

The make install installs the needed files into /usr/local/smr.local and links to this from /usr/local/smr. But do not put anything into /etc/rc.local.

Files needed

In mobotware a configuration example is in mobotware/build/config/gogo and mobotware/build/config/gogo/picam.

ls mobotware/build/config/gogo
  picam  rhdconfig.xml  ucamserver.ini
ls mobotware/build/config/gogo/picam
  aukeeper.ini  connectrhd.rule  keepcam.rule  keeplaser.rule  keepnav.rule  rc.local  startKeeper  ucamserver.ini

In mobotware/build/config/gogo/picam is the configuration files for the raspberry pi camera, the mobotware/build/config/gogo/ucamserver.ini is the configuration file for the single image collecting camera server (mostly for image recording).

Raspberry pi camera

The raspberry pi cameras in this example is named rpi6, rpi7, ... rpi10 as their hostname (in /etc/hostname).

Keeper

The keeper is a server that starts the cameraserver when needed (and restarts it if it crashes or gets stuck in other ways).

The Keeper should be started at reboot using the /etc/rc.local, like this line almostat the end of rc.local:

# rc.local
...
# start keeper
su -c "/home/local/startKeeper" local
#
exit 0

This starts a script placed in /home/local named startKeeper as the user local. This is to run as much as possible without root privileges.

Copy the start script to /home/local (beeing the user local:

cd
cp mobotware/build/config/gogo/picam/startKeeper .
chmod +x startKeeper

Make a live directory where the configuration files for keeper and camera server resides, and copy the ini-files:

mkdir live
cd live
cp mobotware/build/config/gogo/picam/*.ini .

The keeper uses some rules to monitor and restart the cameraserver, these should be in /usr/local/smr/bin/aursconf