🎥 🐝 BeePi

Personal setup of a Raspberry Pi and NOIR camera for recording honeybees in a dark observation hive.

The setup is intended for close up filming of the comb for short durations and uses picam v1.4.11 to record audio and video, or for recording video only using picamera v1.13. The main purpose of this repo is to version control the camera config across subsequent filming periods.

Physical Components

• Raspberry Pi 4 Model B - 4gb memory and 64gb Micro SD Card (v3.6.0).
• Raspberry Pi NoIR Camera Module V2 - camera used for recording.
• BrightPi - 8 Infra red (940nm) and 4 white light LEDs used to light surface of comb.
• PIR Camera Case - hold components together.

Getting started

Install the dependencies by following the installation instructions for picam and BrightPi. picamera is typically pre-installed on Raspberry Pis.s To then test a filming setup with audio, clone this repository and run the following:

# For running from terminal...

# After a reboot of the Pi
./mount_usb  # If there's a USB stick for overflow storage space
./make_dirs  # Create picam directories (from picam docs)

# Run the script (assumes index of microphone is "hw:1,0", can be checked by `arecord -l`)
python3 record.py --debug

There are a few different arguments I use when recording footage.

[00:09:10] 🚀 beepi $ python3 record.py --help
usage: record.py [-h] [--experiment_name EXPERIMENT_NAME] [--fps FPS]
                 [--width WIDTH] [--height HEIGHT] [--camera_mode CAMERA_MODE]
                 [--segment_length SEGMENT_LENGTH]
                 [--session_length SESSION_LENGTH] [--ir] [--debug]
                 [--use_picamera]

Record segments of video and audio using picam or picamera. Picam can provide
audio from a connected USB microphone; picamera can be used for higher
resolution files (e.g. 1640 x 922 and upwards).

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --experiment_name EXPERIMENT_NAME
                        Name for experimental run.
  --fps FPS             Frames per second to record in.
  --width WIDTH         Width of video in pixels. Defaults to 640.
  --height HEIGHT       Height of video in pixels. Defaults to 480.
  --camera_mode CAMERA_MODE
                        Raspberry pi camera mode. Defaults to 6 (for high fps
                        using picam). Warning: picam modes seem to be shifted
                        by one relative to picamera modes.
  --segment_length SEGMENT_LENGTH
                        Length of an individual video segment (in seconds).
  --session_length SESSION_LENGTH
                        Desired length of resulting footage (in seconds). i.e.
                        21600 - 6hrs, 28800 - 8hrs, 43200 - 12hrs, 64800 -
                        18hrs, 86400 - 24hrs.
  --ir                  Use infrared lighting when recording.
  --debug               Run a small preconfigured test.
  --use_picamera        Use picamera instead of picam for experiment.

Some parameters for filming are held constant. These include the ISO (800), white balance ("greyworld"), and a horizontal and vertical flip of the image.

Example commands

# Record video and audio, 90 fps, low resolution (picam)
python3 record.py --experiment_name sgarden_210809_1156 --width 640 --height 480 --fps 90 --camera_mode 6 --session_length 21600

# Record just video, using full field of view, 30 fps is the highest we can go (picamera)
python3 record.py --experiment_name sgarden_210809_1156 --width 1640 --height 1232 --fps 30 --camera_mode 4 --session_length 21600 --use_picamera