RaspberryPi Camera Streaming

Stream multiple cameras to a single server for central storage.

The system provides image streaming sources for RaspberryPi and JetsonNano and a single streaming sink which saves jpeg images to disk. You can run a single storage sink on your network and multiple camera streaming sources and the sink will save the images locally.

This is surprisingly simple to setup and run with the only requirements over what is needed on each system to run their cameras in python is pyzmq.

There are a few system packages to install to get started, but I haven't started from a clean OS install on either the raspberry pi or jetson nano so I don't have a full list. The tools will report what's missing if you run them and it should be a simple thing to then work out what packages need installing.

I'll get around to a clean build at some point and will update the documentation here.

Quickstart

The tools use pyzmq to send images over the network. On the pi and the jetson nano, install this with pip in the user install location. Virtual environments won't work on these devices as they need system installed versions of other libraries to access the camera hardware. See the requirements.txt file for the specific version that I have built and tested with.

To get started, on the sink machine, run the sink server. This command below tells the server to listen for connections on all interfaces and to write images to a directory called local.

$ ./storage-sink.py -a local
listening at tcp://192.168.1.137:8089

Then on each device with the camera, run the streamer, for example:

$ ./picam2-src.py --mode 6 --fps 2 --hflip --vflip tcp://192.168.1.137:8089

This puts the camera in mode 6 (this is 1920x1080 for my camera), captures and streams images at 2 frames per second, flips the image horizontally and vertically so it show up the right way, and sends the images to the sink running at address 192.168.1.137.

Sinks

Storage Sink

The full usage is:

$ ./storage-sink.py -h
usage: storage-sink.py [-h] [-a] [-p PORT] [-i] outdir

positional arguments:
  outdir                location to save images
  
options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -a, --all             listen on all interfaces
  -p PORT, --port PORT  port to listen on
  -i, --ipc             use the IPC transport

This receives images from any number of streamers and writes the images to disk.

$ ./storage-sink.py  -a local
listening at tcp://192.168.1.137:8089
saving local/jetson/image_0000.jpg (1359935 bytes)
saving local/pi-cam02/image_0000.jpg (633332 bytes)
saving local/pi-cam03/image_0000.jpg (577508 bytes)
saving local/jetson/image_0001.jpg (1360378 bytes)
saving local/pi-cam02/image_0001.jpg (632811 bytes)
saving local/pi-cam03/image_0001.jpg (576822 bytes)
saving local/jetson/image_0002.jpg (1361347 bytes)
saving local/pi-cam02/image_0002.jpg (633313 bytes)
saving local/pi-cam03/image_0002.jpg (577065 bytes)
saving local/jetson/image_0003.jpg (1361784 bytes)
saving local/pi-cam02/image_0003.jpg (632961 bytes)
saving local/pi-cam03/image_0003.jpg (576485 bytes)
saving local/jetson/image_0004.jpg (1361108 bytes)
saving local/pi-cam02/image_0004.jpg (632212 bytes)
saving local/pi-cam03/image_0004.jpg (632460 bytes)

Preview Sink

Not yet implemented.

Streamers

Raspberry Pi Streamer

The full usage is:

$ ./picam2-src.py -h
usage: picam2-src.py [-h] [-n NAME] [-l LIMIT] [-r FPS] [-m MODE] [--hflip] [--vflip] url

positional arguments:
  url                   the url to stream to (tcp://<address>:<port> or ipc://<path>)
  
options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -n NAME, --name NAME  the name of this node
  -l LIMIT, --limit LIMIT
                        total frames to send
  -r FPS, --fps FPS     camera frame rate
  -m MODE, --mode MODE  the camera mode
  --hflip               flip the image horizontally
  --vflip               flip the image vertically

A typical example would be:

./picam2-src.py --mode 6 --fps 2 --hflip --vflip tcp://192.168.1.137:8089

This will stream images to the sink running on host '192.168.1.137' listening on port 8089.

Jetson Streamer

Full usage is:

$ ./nvargus-src.py -h
usage: nvargus-src.py [-h] [-n NAME] [-l LIMIT] [-r FPS] [--hflip]
                           [--vflip] [-c]
                           url
                           
positional arguments:
  url                   the url to stream to (tcp://<address>:<port> or
                        ipc://<path>)
                        
optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -n NAME, --name NAME  the name of this node
  -l LIMIT, --limit LIMIT
                        limit the number of frames to send
  -r FPS, --fps FPS     camera frame rate
  --hflip               flip the image horizontally
  --vflip               flip the image vertically
  -c, --centre          crop the centre square of the image