Camera¶

This is only in the idea stage. No development on this has started.

Making remote camera controlled by Ironman has been an interesting problem. Many solutions use Arduinos. But then I ran across an interesting idea using a RPi Zero W set inside a dummy camera housing. That led me to think about how I can use PiBox directly instead of using an Arduino based solution.

High Level Camera Design

The camera is based on a RPi Zero W running a new PiBox Lite release (PiBox stripped of X and other unnecessary components). A web API is built using Mongoose (web server written in C and easily extendable) that basically just starts up mjpeg-streamer just as the PiCam app current does. mjpeg-streamer provides a URL that the monitor will access.

The monitor is the standard Ironman Monitor with the addition of a new app: IMCameras. This is based on PiCam but supports selection of which camera to visually monitor. It also supports the following commands issued to selected monitors.

• Start recording
• Stop recording
• Play a recording
• Live view

A stretch goal is to allow display of up to four cameras at once. This would work only if omxplayer can be convinced to display only into a subsection of the framebuffer. Alternatively, a different player with hardware acceleration might be found, such as mpv.