Tag: DietPi

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My Pi 400 Travel Desktop

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow8472, and today I am trying out my Raspberry Pi 400 as a lightweight daily driver. Let’s get started.

rPi 400

The Pi 400 is a special edition of Raspberry Pi – essentially a Pi 4 built into a keyboard. It’s missing a USB 2.0 port (made up for by the keyboard) and the 3.5mm audio jack. In theory, the miniature keyboard computer is perfect for travel – assuming you have a screen at your destination that is.

Choosing a Distro

My first thought was to try installing Arch. A brief search found an Arch on ARM project as vanilla Arch only supports x86 architecture. The instructions involved formatting a drive on the terminal. I bought a 256 GB SD card and did so on the first convenient rPi install I had – Kali linux.

It took a few failed attempts to install Arch. The pure open source method that reportedly works on the regular Pi 4 didn’t on my Pi 400, and the standard method wasn’t cooperative when installing a login manager and any of a few desktop environments. Running on a time crunch before leaving on a trip, I switched to DietPi, another lightweight distro I’ve worked with before for, but for a much different project. As with Arch, MATE was uncooperative, so I settled with XFCE. Special thanks to Balena Etcher for a special warning when formatting large drives.

Packing For a Trip

To shortcut setup, I copied my browser and LibreOffice data from my main desktop. LibreOffice worked for me, but didn’t carry the full dark mode – a problem I’ve encountered before, but ultimately decided to live with.

Firefox ESR –as installed from DietPi’s hedged garden– refused to accept my profile. Regular Firefox –installed from the apt repositories– was up to date and started as expected. Notably, it included my extensions – especially Bitwarden, my password vault.

A screen was not procured at my destination, so I packed one from home. The missing audio jack was also problematic, so I packed my Blue Yeti with plans to disable voice monitoring. For redundancy, I packed an HDMI monitor, but busted the ​​styrofoam while stuffing it into the slightly wrong box. As of writing, I have done nothing with sound.

Deployment

We left on our trip. Upon arriving, I found my over-packed tech bag lacked a long enough HDMI cable. I borrowed a longer one. The monitor signal kept flickering. For a while, I assumed I was overloading the Pi with a couple hundred browser tabs, but after a power blink and several reboots, it came out that the HDMI was bad. We bought a replacement, and it’s been working properly since.

Ejected Challenges

Arch wasn’t the only thing I had to back off from. I brought a couple additional Pi 4’s to have myself a nice, little network with Pi-Hole ad blocking, but Wi-Fi strength and configuration challenges meant those were both a no-go.

Another challenge I want to pull off is playing Stardew Valley. I copied the files over back home, but haven’t had time to try the conversion I found yet.

Takeaway

Finishing a project as a rule is better than stalling an overly ambitious one. I have an on-the-go workstation, even though it still lacks polish.

Of special interest, this week marks the 6th anniversary of my Robotics Lab. And some months ago, I decided I wanted to do a Sabbath year cycle. I’ve proven that I can be consistent at posting, even if I feel my quality slips some weeks. The facts of the matters is that weekly posts are getting a bit repetitive for me, so for the next year, I’m only going to post when I finish a major project, such as when I have the full software suite I have in mind for my homelab. After that, perhaps I’ll stick to monthly. We’ll see in a year’s time.

Final Question

Setting up a travel computer on the quick was a bit of a trick. What must-haves would you include in a similar package?

I look forward to hearing your answers in the comments below or on my Socials.

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MotionEye: One Step Closer to a Critter Cam

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am revisiting my naughty critter cam again. Let’s get started!

Project Recap

Earlier this year, I spent a week learning about DietPi, a lightweight OS for “System On a Chip” computers — notably Raspberry Pi, and Motion, an open source home surveillance platform. These fit great into my Raspberry Pi 3B+. I burned out after getting it to stream video to a webpage.

Version numbers have marched on since, and updates were in order. Long story short, it was simpler to reinstall and relive the week in the span of one day. I set the standard “new install” settings, and installed motion from within DietPi’s “hedged garden.” I copied a default config file at /etc/motion/motion.conf to /root (I am approaching this as a short-term/low security project) and struggled against the documentation. It led me to mess with mmalcam_params when all I needed was:

rotate 180
webcontrol_localhost false
stream_localhost false

These lines rotate the image and unlock Motion’s webUI.

MotionEyeOS

The final deciding factor to reinstall started when I came across a new command for listing ports Linux will respond on:

ss -list

I found port 8765 with a login I couldn’t get in. Only after a total reinstall did I look up motionEye and find the default login is “admin” with an empty password. It’s a nice webUI, but it won’t share the camera with motion proper, and it took me a while to cycle through the different options to find the feed. My favorite feature is that it passed the “Oops, it lost power” test.

Push Notifications

MotionEye can run a commands when it sees something move, which can be anything from object detection to filter false positives to an automated squirt gun when it recognizes naughty behavior. My next major milestone though should be push notifications. On Linux, I can use notify-send over ssh, but I’d need to research an equivalent way for it to show up on Windows, Mac, and Android for other family members. In the long run, it will be simpler to dust off my Discord bot skills and give a LAN address.

So, that’s what I did. I made a bot that sends a hard coded message to a hard coded channel and closes itself as part of its startup function.

#!/usr/bin/python3

import os
import discord

intents = discord.Intents.default()
client = discord.Client(intents=intents)

#On startup: send message to and close program
@client.event
async def on_ready():
channel = client.get_channel(<channel_ID>)
await channel.send(f"Motion Detected!\nhttp://192.168.0.50:8765")
exit()

client.run('<Bot_Login_Token>')

MotionEye could run the bot once I placed it in /mnt/dietpi_userdata/, gave it permission to execute, and ensured it belonged to the dietpi user. Before too long, I had notifications through Discord to check Motion, and the hardest part of deployment was turning on the Pi’s power switch. For my “Show & Tell,” my father and I rigged up a cat tower and an LED work light on a stand to watch the stairs.

Takeaway

This temporary setup remains incomplete. For starters, the Discord bot wastes around four seconds logging in. I will eliminate this delay once I can get a signal from MotionEye into a running bot. Also of concern is that I want the bot ignoring humans – which means object detection, a field I’m not far into yet.

Final Question

Am I missing anything obvious on my road map? Let me know in the comments below or on my Socials!

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Pi Spycam: Prototype Deployment

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am trying to solve an animal misbehavior problem around the house, and we don’t know who’s done doing it. And I’m literally dusting off an old project to help. Let’s get started!

Blinkie Pie is a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a case themed after a PacMan ghost. I modified the files to include a Pi camera module looking out its left eye, but got bogged down with computer vision trying to automate critter punishment. Well, in the present day, one or both of our cats keeps doing something in the same area of the house, and a video feed served over HTTP (to access via browser) could let us monitor things on a second screen. After a brief survey of open source projects, Motion looks to be exactly what I think I need. [1]

DietPi looks like a good base OS. The article I found says it’s based on Debian Buster [2], but I’m only after a short-term project. I checked on Pkgs.org and Motion is listed as in the Debian Buster ARM repositories. [3]

Modern DietPi is based on Debian Bookworm as I found out when I downloaded it. Motion was present, but setup was annoying. I’ll spare the blow by blow, but the terminal program serving as its installer doesn’t think like me. Sometimes it ran quite slow (Pi 3B+ being old?). Credit to the install script where credit is due, but it got hung up trying to update, so I had to drop out and unsnag it manually.

Motion was obtuse to get working. While pounding around for a solution, I found a curated list of software calling the project motionEye. It didn’t find the camera module until after a reboot or two. My only confirmation was terminal activity in response to motion in front of the camera. And working from the command line, I can’t check on Motion’s web interface. A few hours of diagnostic research later, I used curl over SSH and found data on Blinkie Pie’s localhost:8081, but not over network_ip:8081 – which is a wise default configuration with the base OS lacking a firewall, but annoying for my low security use case of monitoring cats. I overrode this setting with a config option at ~/.motion/motion.conf.

# Restrict stream connections to the localhost.
stream_localhost off

I now had images around once per second, but they were coming through upside-down because of how I mounted my camera module in its case. I Modified a similar setting to allow the webUI, but it was very limited. I’d spent a while Thursday night trying to solve this flip issue from the config file, but I only ended up jamming terms from documentation in ways that didn’t work. I circled back around on Friday afternoon and used a search function to find settings for both rotation and flip, but later realized the system only flipped vertically (probably because I used two lines).

With high to mediocre hopes, I deployed Blinkie Pie to watch over Sabbath. The image came out dark, so I found an old desk lamp I had stashed in a closet and left a few other lights on. The good news is that it was more stable than during tentative testing. The only difference I can think of I that I was only SSH’ing over Wi-Fi once instead of for two links.

To access the recordings, my first instinct was to use SCP, a program to transfer files over the SSH protocol. DietPi operating system does not include SCP by default. Instead, I logged in with the FISH protocol, which doesn’t require anything special on the other end besides SSH. Bonus: I could use it with Dolphin (KDE’s file browser). Unfortunately, the default motion detection settings mostly caught human family. Our little, white dog starred in a couple automated recordings, but my black Labrador was seen in one clip being ordered to lay down in the observation zone without any footage from when he got up and left. At no point did I see a cat who wasn’t being carried.

Takeaway

This project didn’t catch anycreature in the act, but I’m still satisfied with my progress this week, and I intend to follow it up later this month where I tweak the configuration to be more sensitive to smaller creatures.

Final Question

Have you any suggestions on tracking cats with Motion or a similar technology?

Works Cited

[1] C. Schroder, “How to Operate Linux Spycams With Motion,” linux.com,July 10, 2014. [Online]. Available: https://www.linux.com/training-tutorials/how-operate-linux-spycams-motion/. [Accessed Mar. 11, 2024].

[2] C. Cawley, “The 8 Best Lightweight Operating Systems for Raspberry Pi,” makeuseof.com, Nov. 7, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/lightweight-operating-systems-raspberry-pi/. [Accessed Mar. 11, 2024].

Available:

[3]pkgs.org, [Online]. Available: https://pkgs.org/search/?q=motion. [Accessed Mar. 11, 2024].

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