FDRI Raspberry Pi Camera

This repository holds the script and configuration for setting up a Raspberry Pi camera to monitor the environment on one of the FDRI sites.

Getting set up

This code has dependencies on libcamera which can only be used on Rasberry PI's, so it cannot be installed on any other machine.

Install the linux dependencies

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo apt-get install python3 python3-picamzero python3-libcamera libcap-dev -y

Deploy on a Raspberry PI

Load the code onto a Raspberry Pi by pulling the git repository to it. To do this you need an internet connection.

First, create a deploy key on the GitHub repository.

Copy the private key onto the Rasberry PI into ~/.ssh/id_github.

Create a config file in ~/.ssh/config

Host github.com
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_github

Clone the repository

git clone [email protected]:NERC-CEH/FDRI_RaspberryPi_Scripts.git

When there is a code change you can then run:

git pull

Configuration

Site configuration

The file config.yaml in the config directory contains a description of the site. It looks like this:

site: CARGN
lat: 51.8626453
lon: -0.2031049
camera: SE
direction: E
interval: 3000

This is used to control the capture interval, create the filenames, and use the location's sun times to tell when to stop and start taking pictures.

Environment variables

The code expects some environment variables to connect to AWS. These are set in the file .env

AWS_ROLE_ARN="<>"
AWS_BUCKET_NAME="<>"
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="<>"
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="<>"

Where the "<>" has been replaced with the secrets. Ask @JacHam12 or @metazool if you don't know what they are.

• AWS_ROLE_ARN - The uploader role
• AWS_BUCKET_NAME - Name of the bucket that receives the images
• AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID - AWS access key ID
• AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY - AWS secret access key

Site-specific configuration

Replace the values in config.yaml with those of your specific installation

site: CARGN
lat: 51.8626453
lon: -0.2031049
camera: SE
direction: E

Setup script

setup.sh automates most steps of the setup - upgrades the Pi's packages with apt, installs our python code and configures it to run through systemctl.

bash setup.sh

Create a Virtual Environment

Because libcamera is installed as a linux package it will be installed into the default python3 installation so you need an extra flag when creating a virtual environment

python -m venv --system-site-packages .venv

Activate the environment

source .venv/bin/activate

Install the codebase and dependencies

pip install -e .

How to Run the Code

An example of how to run the code is in ./src/rasberrycam/__main__.py. This can be run as:

python src/raspberrycam/__main__.py

or

# Special invocation for a file called __main__.py
python -m raspberrycam

Ensure that the latitude/longitude are set correctly or the python code may exit at the wrong time.

fdri_assets