I am trying to set up a simple web camera to take some photos and videos of birds on our bird table.
I have had an edimax ip camera for a long time, but have had some trouble with using and configuring it from Linux. So, I am having an attempt with a different approach from bits of hardware I have around. There is a Linksys NLSLU2, which is made as a network storage device, and I just picked up a logitech usb web camera. I decided to use OpenWRT as the operating system, because I used that on a previous project (bifferboard weather station).
This post is a few notes of where I have got to, and the problems encountered.
Operating System
- Download OpenWRT: To start with I used a tarball of OpenWRT 'backfire' 10.03, but it problems with packages not being compatible. Rather than understand why, I went for checking out the latest source code from the 'backfire' branch of the OpenWRT SVN repository.
- Build OpenWRT: This is as simple as changing into the source directory and doing 'make menuconfig', selecting the target system as 'IXP4xx', then the profile as NSLU2, exiting and typing 'make'. This creates a flash disk image as bin/ixp4xx/openwrt-nslu2-squashfs.bin.
- Put the NSLU2 into upgrade mode by powering off, pressing and holding the reset button with a paper clip then powering on. Wait for ~10 sec until the top LED changes colour (very difficult for me to tell as I am colour blind...), then release the reset button. The top LED now flashes two slightly different colours.
- Connect the computer with the OpenWRT image on it to the same ethernet network as the NSLU2 - Wireless connections do not work!.
- Flash the new image onto the NSLU2 using 'sudo upslug2 -i openwrt-nslu2-squashfs.bin'.
- Once the flashing is complete, the NSLU2 reboots and you should be able to telnet into it - default ip address is 192.168.1.1, which is a pain if that is the same one as your router...
Configuring OpenWRT
The basic OpenWRT build does not do much, so it needs to be configured and the extra required packages adding:
- Default IP Address - this can be set by editing package/base-files/files/etc/config/network [there is probably a better way to do this, but this works...].
- Add the drivers for the USB video cameras - using menuconfig select them in the kernel config section - make sure they are selected to be built-in [*] rather than modules [M], because otherwise they are not included in the flash drive image.
- Add some software to do something with the video source - add the mjpg-streamer and motion packages.
- Re-build OpenWRT and re-flash it.
- You should now be able to look at :8080?action=stream and see the image from the camera from mjpeg-stream
Making it Do Something Useful
- mjpg-streamer seems to work nicely and produces a jpeg stream that can be viewed on a browser. No sound though - will have to look into how to deal with that.
- motion also seems to work - need to modify /etc/motion.conf to tell it what to do.
- I would really like to to record video clips when motion is detected, so am currently trying to see if I can build ffmpeg to link that to motion.....
- I have run out of time this weekend. What I have done is just used motion and removed mjpeg-streamer, as motion provides a mjpeg stream too. The basic set-up is:
- Logitec usb web cam.
- Motion records images to /tmp/cam1/// - separated into different directories to stop the numbers of files getting out of hand.
- A little php script /cgi-bin/browse.php is used to browse through the directories and view the images.
- I could not get ffmpeg to compile, so no videos for now.
- This is going to be installed at my sisters, so will have to talk her through setting up her router so I can ssh into it remotely to fix it when it does not work.....
- My version, using the same motion and php script set up, but using the edimax ip camera can be seen at http://maps.webhop.net/webcam.
