In my post about getting Flask running as a service, I included a screenshot with a large dark area as the background. In this post, I will work on filling it with an image from a web camera, which will run on the same Raspberry Pi. I will cover the guages in a later post.
The software I am using is called Motion and is available for download from the project GitHub. The two cameras I am using are:
- An aftermarket Raspberry Pi camera,
with IR led’s1, however, it is quite old - An inexpensive generic USB camera, probably about 5 years old.
Getting Motion onto the Pi with a USB Cam
SSH onto the Raspberry Pi and log in. The following are run from the Pi, at this point, the USB camera is the only one attached. I haven’t managed to get the latest version of Motion working, so at the moment I am using Motion 4.7.0 for the 64-bit ARM. 4.7.1 fails due to having unmet dependencies.
cd ~
wget https://github.com/Motion-Project/motion/releases/download/release-4.7.0/bookworm_motion_4.7.0-1_arm64.deb -O motion.deb
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt dist-upgrade
sudo apt install autoconf automake build-essential pkgconf libtool libzip-dev libjpeg-dev gettext libmicrohttpd-dev libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev libavutil-dev libswscale-dev libavdevice-dev default-libmysqlclient-dev libpq-dev libsqlite3-dev libwebp-dev libcamera-v4l2
sudo dpkg -i motion.deb
sudo nano /etc/motion/motion.conf
My config differs from the basic config, but these changes will get you started:
Find the following lines and ensure they are set to the values below.
daemon off
stream_localhost off
To enable motion as a demon so it starts every boot, and to get it started running now, enter the following commands:
sudo systemctl enable motion
sudo systemctl start motion
The config file will tell you what the default port for the webcam is. I have mine running on Port 8081. There are other changes in my config file that also help to speed up the frame rate; we will cover them in a bit.
You can’t see much in this image, it’s pointing at a keyboard… but it does prove it’s working (the masking tape pointing it at a servo has given up at the moment).
I mentioned a second camera…
Motion with a Raspberry Pi Camera
Motion doesn’t support the Raspberry Pi Cam out the box,
the command v4l2-ctl –list-devices tells me I have a few video devices available:
The CSI ones are the Raspberry Pi Camera; the USB Camera is listed as video_device /dev/video in the motion config that is working above.
According to cat /etc/os-release:
cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)"
NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="12"
VERSION="12 (bookworm)"
VERSION_CODENAME=bookworm
ID=debian
HOME_URL="https://www.debian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://www.debian.org/support"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.debian.org/"
Because I am running Bookworm, it turns out that legacy camera has been removed in Debian Bookworm, and Motion will NOT work directly with the Pi Camera unless you add a compatibility layer.
sudo apt install libcamera-apps v4l-utils
sudo nano /boot/firmware/config.txt
- Add the lines:
- start_x=1
- gpu_mem=256
- Comment out
- # camera_auto_detect=1
My three config files are now:
/etc/motion/motion.conf
daemon off
stream_localhost off
webcontrol_localhost off
# Level of log messages [1..9] (EMG, ALR, CRT, ERR, WRN, NTC, INF, DBG, ALL).
log_level 6
# Target directory for pictures, snapshots and movies
target_dir /home/pi/vids
camera /etc/motion/motion1.conf
camera /etc/motion/motion2.conf
/etc/motion/motion1.conf
############################################################
# Image Processing configuration parameters
############################################################
camera_name USBcam
# USB Webcam
video_device /dev/video0
# Image width in pixels.
width 640
# Image height in pixels.
height 480
# Maximum number of frames to be captured per second.
framerate 30
# Text to be overlayed in the lower left corner of images
text_left CAMERA 1\n%{fps} FPS
# Text to be overlayed in the lower right corner of images.
text_right %Y-%m-%d\n%T-%q
v4l2_palette 17
stream_port 8081
webcontrol_port 8088
/etc/motion/motion2.conf
############################################################
# Image Processing configuration parameters
############################################################
camera_name PiCam
# Raspberry Pi Camera (CSI)
videodevice /dev/video2
# Image width in pixels.
width 640
# Image height in pixels.
height 480
# Maximum number of frames to be captured per second.
framerate 30
# Text to be overlayed in the lower left corner of images
text_left CAMERA 2\n%{fps} FPS
# Text to be overlayed in the lower right corner of images.
text_right %Y-%m-%d\n%T-%q
v4l2_palette 17 # YUYV
stream_port 8083
webcontrol_port 8089
Image from my second camera (CSI RPi Cam):
Image from my first camera (USB Cam)
Given the hassle of using the CSI Camera, when I update the software from Raspberry Pi Debian to Bookworm, to Trixie I suspect I will move to just using USB Cameras.
