spiPi -- An internet of things, object detection, artisticly interactive python websock camera for the raspberry pi and the picamera.

The purpose of the spiPi is to be a Webcontrolled Video camera that produces data from the images that are processed. The picamera library has a variety of default filters and image enhacements, many of these are opimized to work directly with the hardware so it runs very fast.

https://picamera.readthedocs.io/en/release-1.13/

the spiPi has two features, right now

By doing object detection with opencv, the camera sends the coordinates of these objects to a MQTT broker. Now that the feature data is out of the pi, there are a variety of functions and interesting interactions that we can do with it. ( Please see the Digital Culture Server, here https://github.com/sylatupa/Digital_Culture_Server ; and also look here for more examples of this data being consumed: Pure Data Synthesizer: https://github.com/sylatupa/Digital-Culture-Sound-Client & IOT Device https://github.com/sylatupa/Digital_Multi_Tool_w_ESP32

So, this camera allows for artistic sampling of video data, a transmission of that data using a contemporary protocol MQTT.

Reasoning and Motivations

IOT and the arts: There is so much support for raspberry pis and they are small enough to run off a battery (and they are inexpensive). This project tries to solve a few things:

• Turning video data into a readily available data source
• Be able to provide a direct solution to gathering video that is easy as buying something off the shelf, but provides many more benefits. For a variety of uses, such as: -- Security of the home and business -- Art and entertainment using video data that is collected live and in place (in situ) -- Citizen science, for the collection of time lapse video.

Stand alone server benefits: Stand alone wifi-router: This project uses an additional wifi-router that is plugged into my homes wifi router, so it is interntet connected. But, the benefit of having this additional router layer is that I can take it with me to bring the network into locations that wouldn't have accessible wifi. Getting a battery operated wifi could make this potentially able to be run anywhere.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

Networking:

Running headless:

Installing

(spiPi_requirements.txt) https://gist.github.com/sylatupa/e74248aba2906976b52d9d6011b660de

Running the tests

Deployment

with venv being the virtual environment folder, type:
source venv/bin/activate

which opens the virtual environment: 
(venv)pi@spipi:~/spiPi $

then type:
python specrideo.py

Now open a browser and go the the ip address for the raspberry pi, and go to port 8000.

Built With

• Python 3.4m
• virtualenv
• opencv --this was the most difficult to install. But, please see the pip installation requirements. And, the list of installation steps are available in this project.

Contributing

#(comment) Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our code of conduct, and the process for submitting pull requests to us.

Versioning

Authors

• S P Y-M - *Wrote and collected supporting code.
• Contributors:

License

Acknowledgments

https://picamera.readthedocs.io/en/release-1.13/