Outdoor Camera Mounting

[tracer55]

Hello Folks,

While waiting on the board, I wonder if there will also be a ready made case which can be bought for outdoor mounting of the camera or we need to proceed with using broken dome cameras such as:



To build it in. I was thinking on couple of outdoor designs so far, the easiest seems to be a high diameter PVC pipe with arcyclic plastic in 360 degrees around.

I wonder if you guys tested the StereoPI outside for a longer time period (days) on the sun and experienced something like this:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/view ... p?t=190355

That camera works just fine indoors any time I take it in, but outside in sun its just a big whitescreen, not much help from the community either so I will replace it with Stereopi anyway.

Since this is going to be other part of a project if using dome I was considering having the dome up (face the sky) and having the dome look downwards like regular CCTV cameras. I guess it is not good for it if sun shines directly on it in 35C summer anyway.

Please let me know all your outdoor experiences with the camera.

Thank you.

[Realizator]

We did not mounted StereoPi outdoor, so can not help you with enclosure advice.
But our Sergey @Gol has indoor-mounted camera looking at the street. It works 24x7, with auto settings, and we have no problems you mentioned in your link to Pi forum. But we use only stock Raspbian and native raspivid/raspistill for that.

[tracer55]

Ok so more than 1 year later I still considering on building this project

Something like:



I will probably not custom build a housing like he did but buy a broken CCTV dome camera and put the PI in it.

I would be happy if others could share their outside capture experiences with the StereoPI, I planning to run this for years.

I have a system with an RPI2, V2 camera, weather sensor built into an IP box since many years on my roof, these cameras work PERFECT inside the building however outside things getting weird.

When it was even a little sun all I got was a big bright white page nothing else so after wasting time on the RPI forum and other places who said oh it's only specific to yours first I completely replaced my OS which was kali linux at the time with the latest 10 Raspbian Buster then I replaced the camera module maybe that is what's causing the issue.

My motioin conf is:

Code: Select all

daemon on
process_id_file /home/cam/motion.pid
setup_mode off
logfile /home/cam/cam/log/motion.log
log_level 5
log_type all
v4l2_palette 17
input -1
norm 0
frequency 0
rotate 90
width 720
height 1280
framerate 30
minimum_frame_time 0
netcam_keepalive off
netcam_tolerant_check off
auto_brightness off
brightness 0
contrast 0
saturation 0
hue 0
roundrobin_frames 1
roundrobin_skip 1
switchfilter off
threshold 1500
threshold_tune off
noise_level 32
noise_tune on
despeckle_filter EedDl
smart_mask_speed 0
lightswitch 0
minimum_motion_frames 1
pre_capture 0
post_capture 0
event_gap 60
max_movie_time 0
emulate_motion off
output_pictures off
output_debug_pictures off
quality 75
picture_type jpeg
ffmpeg_output_movies off
ffmpeg_output_debug_movies off
ffmpeg_timelapse 0
ffmpeg_timelapse_mode daily
ffmpeg_bps 500000
ffmpeg_variable_bitrate 0
ffmpeg_video_codec mpeg4
use_extpipe off
snapshot_interval 0
locate_motion_mode off
locate_motion_style box
text_right %Y-%m-%d\n%T-%q
text_changes off
text_event %Y%m%d%H%M%S
text_double on
snapshot_filename %v-%Y%m%d%H%M%S-snapshot
picture_filename %v-%Y%m%d%H%M%S-%q
movie_filename %v-%Y%m%d%H%M%S
timelapse_filename %Y%m%d-timelapse
ipv6_enabled off
stream_port 8081
stream_quality 50
stream_motion off
stream_maxrate 100
stream_localhost off
stream_limit 0
stream_auth_method 1
stream_authentication admin:bigsecret
webcontrol_port 8082
webcontrol_localhost on
webcontrol_html_output on
track_type 0
track_auto off
track_iomojo_id 0
track_step_angle_x 10
track_step_angle_y 10
track_move_wait 10
track_speed 255
track_stepsize 40
quiet on

So now instead of getting a big white nothing I get red shifted picture (at least you can see something). So this is the kind of things I would like to avoid with buying the StereoPI but I would like to see positive reviews first people are using this camera on the open.

Also is it easy to make a 360 degree stream and feed that into MotionEYE OS like a regular fisheye camera?

[Realizator]

Hi tracer55,
In the StereoPi software (specific SLP image) we are using native RaspiOS camera-related features. I.e. raspivid tool, but not v4l2. BTW, as I know the latest V4L2 use MMAL under the hood and interact with the camera the same way as raspivid. We prefer to use this as we have many more options and support from RPF (and even our own, fixed, and compiled from source raspivid version).
Your mentioned white nothing and red shifted images on a regular Pi means specific settings you're using. MotionEye is a specific image, and we have no experience with it.
To say briefly, if you get reliable solution with the classic Pi, you can repeat it on the StereoPi, but with 2 cameras.
As for the 360 degree stream - we can stream two images from two 180 degree cameras. But "stitching" them to the sphere should be done on the receiving part.