I've been playing around with the Raspberry Pi Zero W lately and having so much fun on the command line. For those uninitiated it's a tiny Arm computer running Raspbian, a derivative of Debian. It has a 1 GHz processor that had the ability to be overclocked and 512 MB of RAM, in addition to wireless g and bluetooth.
A few weeks ago I built a garage door opener with video and accessible via the net. I wanted to do something a bit different and settled on a dashcam for my brother-in-law's SUV.
I wanted the camera and Pi Zero W mounted on the dashboard and to be removed with ease. On boot it should autostart the RamDashCam (RDC) and there should also be 4 desktop scripts dashcam.sh, startdashcam.sh, stopdashcam.sh, shutdownshutdown.sh. Also create and a folder named video on the Desktop for the older video files. I also needed a way to power the RDC when there is no power to the vehicle's usb ports. Lastly I wanted it's data accessible on the local LAN when the vehicle is at home.
Here is the parts list:
- Raspberry Pi Zero W kit (I got mine from Vilros.com)
- Raspberry Pi official camera
- Micro SD card, at least 32 gigs
- A 3d printed case from thingverse.com
- Portable charger, usually used to charge cell phones and tablets on the go
- Command strips, it's like double sided tape that's easy to remove or velcro strips
First I flashed the SD card with Raspbian, powered it up and followed the setup menu. I also set a static IP address.
Now to the fun stuff. Lets create a service so we can start and stop RDC via systemd. Using your favorite editor, navigate to "/etc/systemd/system/" and create "dashcam.service" and add the following:
[Unit]
Description=dashcam service
After=network.target
StartLimitIntervalSec=0
[Service]
Type=forking
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=1
User=pi
WorkingDirectory=/home/pi/Desktop
ExecStart=/bin/bash /home/pi/Desktop/startdashcam.sh
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Now that's complete lets enable the service, run the following: sudo systemctl enable dashcam
I added these scripts to start and stop RDC on the Desktop so my brother-in-law doesn't have to mess around in the menus or command line. Remember to "chmod +x" these 4 scripts.
startdashcam.sh
#!/bin/bash
# remove files older than 3 days
find /home/pi/Desktopvideo -type f -iname '*.flv' -mtime +3 -exec rm {} \;
# start dashcam service
sudo systemctl start dashcam
stopdashcam.sh
