Raspberry Pi Web Cam Server Tutorial by Tom, PingBin

I read the GNOME's Cheese reference manual and found it very difficult, and I gave up after 15 minutes.  Then I googled for something easier, to restore my confidence.  I found Tom, PingBin has a tutorial on how to set up a RPi Web Cam Server.  It seems not difficult at all.  So I followed the instructions and set up my web cam server.  Now everybody sees my bench top is a big mess!



How To: Raspberry PI Web Cam Server - Tom, PingBin in Raspberry PI 2012 Dec 28

http://pingbin.com/2012/12/raspberry-pi-web-cam-server-motion/

Raspberry PI Web Cam

The Raspberry PI is perfectly equipped to turn your USB based web cam into a fully functional IP web cam that you can have lots of fun with, from there you could use tools such as Python to make your project more unique, im having a go at counting passing traffic.

If your wanting to something a bit more simple you could just have a web cam that can be access from anywhere with an internet connection, which is what you will end up with at the end of this guide.

...

1. Get the software ready

Ok so I am going to assume that you have a working PI on some kind of LAN with internet access, the next step as always is to update your PI ensuring you have the latest software and drivers installed.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Now we need to install the software, we are going to be using a great little application called Motion, this will do a few things for us including accessing the USB cam, getting the images, and streaming them via a built in web server. As the name suggests it will also track and trigger events on motion been detected in the video frames (more on that later).

sudo apt-get install motion

2. Plug in your web cam

So now the software is on there it’s time to plug in the web cam and ensure that everything is working, ensuring that you plug it into the powered hub, and then into the PI. Otherwise the webcam will not get enough power to turn on.

When plugged in type the “lsusb” command, you should see a line there with your web cam manufacture, that proves that you have the basic connectivity working.

lsusb

....

Bus 001 Device 002: ID 04ea:1142 Microsoft Corp.

....

3. Configure the software

sudo nano /etc/motion/motion.conf

In here there are a few basic changes that you need to perform:

Daemon = OFF to ON

webcam_localhost = ON to OFF

You can change other settings but it’s recommend you don’t take more than 2 frames, and you been the default frame pixel size, for stability.

4. Start the software

To ensure that the motion service will actually start as a daemon we need to change another configuration setting, so enter the following:

sudo nano /etc/default/motion

Then change the value “start_motion_daemon=no” to “yes”

Finally you can start the motion service to stream the web cam images

sudo service motion start

Quick Example Image

Then after about 30 seconds browse to the new web interface, which should be at the below URL (where 192.168.0.100 is your Raspberry PI’s IP address)

http://192.168.0.100:8081

5. Final Tweeks

Web Port

You could change the web interface port to 80 (from the default 8081), so that you can just browse to the IP address without having to put :8081 at the end, it’s really simple to do, just:

sudo nano /etc/motion/motion.conf

And then change “webcam_port 8081″ to “webcam_port 80″, save the file, and restart the motion service.

sudo service motion restart

Port Forwarding

Final suggestion is enable port forwarding on your home broadband router to the Raspberry PI on port 80, that will mean you can access the web cam from anywhere in the world. There are too many routers in the word to explain how to do it here, but I am sure you will find some help on Google, if not please just leave a comment.

Warning; If you give it internet access via port forwarding this does take up quite a bit of bandwidth, and anyone can see your webcam feed, so only show what you want people to see 

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[To: tlfong01@netvigator.com
Subject: BerryIO IP Address
User-Agent: BerryIO
Date: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 06:17:29 +0100
From: tlfong01hongkong@gmail.com
http://192.168.1.56/]

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo nano /etc/motion/motion.conf
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo nano /etc/default/motion

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0424:9512 Standard Microsystems Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0424:ec00 Standard Microsystems Corp.
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0586:341f ZyXEL Communications Corp. NWD2205 802.11n Wireless N Adapter [Realtek RTL8192CU]
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 1a40:0101 Terminus Technology Inc. 4-Port HUB
Bus 001 Device 008: ID 046d:0994 Logitech, Inc. QuickCam Orbit/Sphere AF

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo service motion start
[....] Starting motion detection daemon: motion/usr/bin/motion already running.
. ok

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo service motion start
[ ok ] Starting motion detection daemon: motion.
pi@raspberrypi ~ $

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