aws-samples/cloud-controlled-connected-camera-with-aws-iot-services

Cloud Controlled Connected Camera with AWS IoT Services

Demo assets and instructions to integrate Raspberry camera module with AWS cloud using AWS IoT services.

Components

Requires an AWS account and below components.

Component	Quantity	Description
Raspberry Pi	1	Raspberry Pi 3 or Raspberry Pi 4B(preferred)
Raspberry Pi Camera Module	1	Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3
Servo compatible with LEGOeds	2	Sparkleiot 2kg 360 Degree Rotation Servo
Parts from LEGO Technic	1	LEGO parts inventory
Jumper Wires	6	Jumper wire male to female
Raspberry Pi Camera Cable	1	12" Raspberry Pi Camera Cable

What does this repo do?

This repository contains sample codes and helper scripts that you can use to integrate your camera module with AWS Cloud. Three AWS SDKs are used.

• Amazon Kinesis Video Streams Producer SDK for C++: Used to stream video to AWS cloud.
• Amazon Kinesis Video Streams C WebRTC SDK: Used to stream video using AWS cloud.
• AWS IoT Device SDK for C++ v2: Used to control the camera stand using a device shadow.

This will create two executables:

• c3-camera-producer: Send video using Amazon Kinesis Video Streams Producer SDK while letting you control your camera stand using AWS IoT Device SDK.
• c3-camera-webrtc: Send video using Amazon Kinesis Video Streams WebRTC SDK while letting you control your camera stand using AWS IoT Device SDK.

Steps to run the application

Step1: Build Camera Stand

LEGO build instruction

To make the demo more interesting, the camera stand will be built using LEGO bricks and Servos compatible with LEGOeds.

Link to step-by-step instructions

Cabling

A handy reference of GPIO pinout can be accessed on the Raspberry Pi by running the command pinout. Camrea cabling instructions can be found here: https://picamera.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart.html. GeekServo 2KG Servo has a three-pin connector.

• Brwon: GND
• Red: VCC
• Yellow: Signal

pi@rpi4-demo:~ $ pinout
,--------------------------------.
| oooooooooooooooooooo J8   +======
| 1ooooooooooooooooooo  PoE |   Net
|  Wi                    1o +======
|  Fi  Pi Model 4B  V1.4 oo      |
|        ,----. +---+         +====
| |D|    |SoC | |RAM|         |USB3
| |S|    |    | |   |         +====
| |I|    `----' +---+            |
|                   |C|       +====
|                   |S|       |USB2
| pwr   |hd|   |hd| |I||A|    +====
`-| |---|m0|---|m1|----|V|-------'

J8:
   3V3  (1) (2)  5V         <-- Servo2(for TILT) Red
 GPIO2  (3) (4)  5V             <-- Servo1(for PAN) Red
 GPIO3  (5) (6)  GND
 GPIO4  (7) (8)  GPIO14
   GND  (9) (10) GPIO15
GPIO17 (11) (12) GPIO18
GPIO27 (13) (14) GND        <-- Servo2 Brown
GPIO22 (15) (16) GPIO23     <-- Servo2 Yellow
   3V3 (17) (18) GPIO24
GPIO10 (19) (20) GND            <-- Servo1 Brown
 GPIO9 (21) (22) GPIO25         <-- Servo1 Yellow
GPIO11 (23) (24) GPIO8
   GND (25) (26) GPIO7
 GPIO0 (27) (28) GPIO1
 GPIO5 (29) (30) GND
 GPIO6 (31) (32) GPIO12
GPIO13 (33) (34) GND
GPIO19 (35) (36) GPIO16
GPIO26 (37) (38) GPIO20
   GND (39) (40) GPIO21

The setup in my environment looks like below. I used male to female jumper wires to connect the Servos to the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi.

Step2: Raspberry Pi Setup

Install OS

Install Raspberry Pi OS(bullseye 64bit) on the SD car by following this guide.

Additionally, it is encouraged to update your Raspberry Pi and to verify that the git utility is installed prior to proceeding:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install git -y

Configure Raspberry Pi

Run raspi-config command and change configurations.

• Enable legacy camera
• Enable VNC
• Set VNC resolution to your desired resolution

sudo raspi-config

Edit /boot/config.txt to apply the below configuration changes.

sudo vi /boot/config.txt

#### changes

hdmi_force_hotplug=1
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=51
[pi4]
dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d
camera_auto_detect=1

Reboot the Raspberry Pi and run the below command to check if the camera has been detacted.

Command

sudo vcgencmd get_camera

Output

supported=1 detected=0, libcamera interfaces=1

Command

libcamera-hello --list-cameras

Output

Available cameras
-----------------
0 : imx708 [4608x2592] (/base/soc/i2c0mux/i2c@1/imx708@1a)
    Modes: 'SRGGB10_CSI2P' : 1536x864 [120.13 fps - (768, 432)/3072x1728 crop]
                             2304x1296 [56.03 fps - (0, 0)/4608x2592 crop]
                             4608x2592 [14.35 fps - (0, 0)/4608x2592 crop]

Install development and runtime dependencies

Installs development and runtime dependencies for the SDK.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y \
  automake \
  build-essential \
  cmake \
  git \
  gstreamer1.0-plugins-base-apps \
  gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad \
  gstreamer1.0-plugins-good \
  gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly \
  gstreamer1.0-tools \
  libcurl4-openssl-dev \
  libgstreamer1.0-dev \
  libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev \
  liblog4cplus-dev \
  libssl-dev \
  pkg-config

Verify the GStreamer installation by checking help.

gst-launch-1.0 -h

Let's test encoding by saving video to a file after encoding it with v4l2h264enc encoder.

gst-launch-1.0 libcamerasrc ! \
capsfilter caps="video/x-raw,width=1280,height=720,format=NV12,framerate=30/1,interlace-mode=(string)progressive,colorimetry=bt709" ! \
clockoverlay time-format="%d/%m/%y %H:%M:%S" ! v4l2h264enc extra-controls="controls,h264_profile=4,video_bitrate=620000" ! \
"video/x-h264,level=(string)4" ! h264parse ! matroskamux ! filesink location=output.mkv

Step3: Register Camera as a thing

Obtain AWS credentials

The scripts in this project make use of the AWS CLI in order to provision resources into your AWS account. To use these scripts, create a temporary AWS key pair and set these as environment variables on your Pi. These will only be used to provision your initial set of AWS Cloud resources and can be discarded after the subsequent steps have successfully completed. Follow these instructions to create an AWS access key: https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/create-access-key.

Then, set your AWS access key as environment variables in your Raspberry Pi device:

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<AWS account access key>
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<AWS account secret key>
export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=<AWS region>

Clone this repository and run setup script

To download the repository, run the following command:

cd ~/dev
git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/cloud-controlled-connected-camera-with-aws-iot-services.git

Run the easy install script. Please note that this script will install AWS CLI on your Raspberry Pi, and will also provision AWS Cloud resources on your behalf.

The easy_install script can be passed the AWS IoT Core Thing Name as an argument. If you do not set this, the script will prompt and wait for you to enter a Thing Name before proceeding.

cd cloud-controlled-connected-camera-with-aws-iot-services
./easy_install.sh YOUR_THING_NAME

Step4: Verify the installation

Verify that the script-output folder contains x.509 certificates.

Command

ls script-output/iot/certs

Output

device.cert.pem    device.private.key device.public.key  root-CA.pem

Step5: Run program

Build

CMake provides a number of ways to put dependency on AWS SDKs into the build. Below two are the options explained in Using Dependencies Guide of CMake documentation.

• Using Pre-built Packages With find_package()
  • Sample: Debugging C/C++ AWS IoT Greengrass Components using VSCode
• Downloading And Building From Source With FetchContent
  • Sample: aws-samples / amazon-kinesis-video-streams-demos / canary

The 2nd method is used so that the used AWS SDKs are built from sources as part of the main project. It is recommended to read the Using Dependencies Guide to understand the dependency mangement better.

Create a build directory, and execute CMake from it.

mkdir -p ~/dev/cloud-controlled-connected-camera-with-aws-iot-services/build
cd ~/dev/cloud-controlled-connected-camera-with-aws-iot-services/build
cmake ..
cmake --build .

Running the application

Note

This application should be run as a root user due to the requirement of pigpio library.

If you created necessary resources using easy-install.sh by following this guide, you will find the run-c3-camera.sh in the project's root directory. The run-c3-camera.sh requires DEMO type as an argument.

• producer
• webrtc

Below example will execute c3-camera-webrtc which sends video using Amazon Kinesis Video Streams WebRTC SDK.

cd ~/dev/cloud-controlled-connected-camera-with-aws-iot-services
./run-c3-camera.sh webrtc

Demo

References

• aws-iot-device-sdk-cpp-v2/samples
• amazon-kinesis-video-streams-demos/canary
• Debugging C/C++ AWS IoT Greengrass Components using VSCode
• Install GStreamer 1.18 on Raspberry Pi 4
• GStreamer C++ Tutorial

Security

See CONTRIBUTING for more information.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License.