Cloud CCTV with raspberry pi and Kerberos

quick link | http://kerberos.io

it started with playing around with the raspberry pi then 2 with xmbc and then the third raspberry pi I recently got purely out of playing around with the Raspberry v2.1 camera. it’s pretty sweet actually, for the cost around £50 I can have a fully working computer (especially with the pixel desktop) with Bluetooth and onboard wifi (no more dongles!) it’s pretty sweet.

anyway, I've been planning to make a cluster of computers all together that do different tasks as part of an array, not some stupid supercomputer docker based cluster, just a cluster together of maybe 8 pi3 units all doing different tasks - I'll save that for an another post, however, for now.. .i’m playing around with cameras for a number of purposes, mainly for inclusion over the local network as additional camera views to bring into obs via vlc.

so I started playing around with a number of tools in regards to the camera, started out with the raspicamera software then uv4l and now I've started to play with something a little more well formed. it may NOT do what I want to do the long run but i’ll certainly be having four cameras setup for the place i am right now in the hope that I can easily transplant them from location to location and ultimately set it up for a service for a particular niche i’ll be going after once i get a new smartphone - I'm kinda limited in that department right now, slow and steady as she goes! :)

I'm using a combination of a raspberry pi zero w (cheap, no fast, takes the raspberry camera v2.1 nicely with a great snap together all in one case) that only needs one cable to get it up and running and streaming over your wifi so totally headless plus I'm testing out using a USB camera or another v2.1 raspberry pi camera on the raspberry pi 3 which is quad core CPU and just has generally more grunt than the zero - another has hard wired ethernet connection which I got because I want to stream video over the local network into vlc for obs - I'll do another post on that at some point.

sweet installer dude!

one of the things that really stood out to me is the way they have packaged their installer to make the installation of the sd card for the raspberry pi as easy as possible. using the open source etcher.io program they have splintered off their own program that looks like etcher yet you have a dropdown to install a version of the software setup your networking for wifi or wired and burn it to the card ready to go. it’s pretty damn sweet.

in the cloud

Kerberos has a nice cloud add-on (for a fee) feature where you can push your videos and images straight into the Amazon s3 cloud, it also gives you access to the push bullet integration to let you know of any events that are happening and a link to that event so you can bring it up and review it quickly. it’s really well priced and i’m certain that I'm going to be a pro customer on that service when i have the four cameras up.

pushbullet integration

another nice feature i really like is the ability to send notification messages from the system, I use an open source program called pullover which uses the push bullet system to receive messages, i use it a lot to track new job appearing on upwork, to get notifications as soon as my keywords are noticed so I get a chance of getting the work - with the Kerberos software i get notifications about movement etc, in the future I'm hoping to get notifications that use machine learning to describe things happening in the webcam view.

solar futures

right now I'm relying on the power being on and the wifi being connected, both of these can fail, especially the wifi network can fall over or need rebooting or more credit on the sim so that’s certainly a monthly thing, once i get a hard line a decent wifi router (Blackhawk or something) i should not really have any issues with any of the units connecting to the wifi.

obviously, a wifi router needs power as well as the power to the units, the good thing is that combined (apart from the router) the raspberry pi units do not draw a massive amount of power. with the right kit i should be able to build out a fairly decent solar panel array with a couple of deep cycle batteries in serial to keep the units running outside of the power going off.

local network, upload to cloud?

so one of the features I was looking to get working (I still need this and I'm not sure that Kerberos is going to do it for me is to have a series of raspberry pi 3 boxes with webcams streaming locally over a fast ethernet, I'll probably have to switch out the hub to a gigabit one and up a number of ports from the five port one i have to maybe a ten port - needing four ports for the cameras the ideal would be to have four x 30 fps feeding into obs using the vlc plugin - if I can get that working reliably I'll be pumped - it’s something i’m looking at. so far, i just cannot get that frame rate using this software so it might be something else i use for a secondary outside shot.

too slow for vlc?

the only downside right now is that i wanted something over the local network that ideally was an mjpeg stream running at least at 30 fps over fast ethernet that i could hook into obs as a vlc stream source that i can switch to when I'm outside using a Bluetooth headset, it opens up another dimension to any future streaming programs i want to do and i’m looking to build this out into kit form so that other people can use it as well - being able to rapidly deploy this at events or functions, even co-working spots to do multi-camera interviews. pretty exciting if i can get that quality and speed up.

machine learning!

most exciting feature about kerberos is the machine learning feature, they have a feature where it can work out in the webcam view/scene if it’s a person or an animal which is just mind blowing, the idea of notifications telling me that someone went by on a bike or a car with a certain reg plate so i know it’s family or friends arrive that’s kinda crazy, the fact that we can get our own cloud smart based machine learning devices now is insane, will certainly give us more humanise data, excite to play with this platform

I'll update you when i have everything up and running perfectly! :)

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