There may be situations where you may have to take pictures remotely and view them. With a Raspberry Pi single-board computer, Pi Camera and Socket.IO server, creating a DIY remote camera has never been easier.
To create this remote camera system, you need the following:
- A Raspberry Pi device running Raspbian
- A Pi Camera
- A cloud platform such as Heroku
The Architecture
The diagram below shows you the architecture of the system.
The Pi Camera would be connected to the Raspberry Pi device. The Raspberry Pi will be running a node app that would be listening to a socket.IO server. A client who wants to take a picture would simply request the Socket.IO server for a picture. The server will then forward the request to the Raspberry Pi device. The Raspberry Pi device would then take a picture, and send it to the server. The server would send the picture to the client.
Why can’t I request a picture directly from the Raspberry Pi?
To be able to request a Raspberry Pi device directly for a picture, the device should be running a server. Even though this is very much possible with a Raspberry Pi device, the problem arises with communication. To send a request to the Raspberry Pi device, we should be able to uniquely identify the device. If you are only planning to deploy this setup within your home, then this would be as simple as connecting your Raspberry Pi device to the local network and assigning it a static IP address.
But what if you want to take pictures through the internet? You will have to purchase a static IP address from your ISP to assign it to the Raspberry Pi, and as you may have already known, this is extremely costly. By using a server that runs on a cloud platform, we will have an endpoint that is uniquely identifiable even on the internet. Since our server runs a simple app, we can make use of free cloud platforms like Heroku to host our app.
#socketio #remote-camera #raspberry-pi #pi-camera #nodejs