isitfoggy.today

Introduction

This uses your Raspberry Pi and its camera to take a bunch of pictures every minutes and serves them via a small website. At the end of the day, it will generate a timelapse in mp4 format. Example: https://zero.isitfoggy.com

NOTE: This code has been running on a raspberry pi zero for 8 years but unless you are stuck with an old raspberry pi zero, you should checkout https://github.com/matfra/fenetre.cam which is a more modern/extensible python rewrite supporting many image sources.

There are configuration files for

• nginx
• systemd
• cloudflare DNS/cache
• crontab

Installation

Here is the list of the required dependencies

To take pictures

• raspistill (should already be installed)
• imagemagick

To generate the timelapse

• ffmpeg
• libomxil-bellagio-bin (for GPU accelerated encoding)

To serve the site:

• nginx

To setup your own DNS entry and SSL cert

• certbot
• curl
• jq
• dnsutils

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install -y nginx git ffmpeg libomxil-bellagio-bin imagemagick dnsutils jq curl certbot

Create the isitfoggy user and home directories

sudo useradd -d /opt/isitfoggy -m -G video -s /bin/nologin isitfoggy
sudo chmod -R g+w /opt/isitfoggy

Add yourself to the isitfoggy group so you can write stuff in that dir

sudo usermod -G isitfoggy -a $USER

Logout and log in to get the new group ownership Clone the repo and edit the configuration file

git clone https://github.com:matfra/isitfoggy.today.git /opt/isitfoggy/isitfoggy.today
cd /opt/isitfoggy/isitfoggy.today

Edit the configuration file

cp conf/isitfoggy.conf.example conf/isitfoggy.conf
vim conf/isitfoggy.conf

Run the installer that will create a bunch of symlinks, services and stuff

sudo ./install.sh

Getting SSL certificate

sudo utils/certbot_init.sh

Cloudflare setup

If you are serving this via your home broadband connection, It's highly recommended that you use a CDN to cache the static content. Once you bought a domain (via gandi.net or godaddy.com for example) you can use Cloudflare manage it. Cloudflare provide "protection" for your server but also caching which comes handy for timelapse videos. Users will send requests to publichostname.yourdomain.com and Cloudflare will send you the requests to privatename.yourdomain.com After you transfer your domain to Cloudflare, create the first A record for you public and private fqdn (full qualified domain names) And get an API key (in your profile section). Fill all this information in /etc/isitfoggy.conf and run utils/update_dns.sh

cd utils/update_dns.sh

CREDITS:

• Thanks to https://github.com/stowball/jQuery-rwdImageMaps for the per month daylight browser
• Thanks to https://github.com/mozilla/mozjpeg for fast and efficient JPEG recompression
• Thanks to http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/ssim/index.php for difference detection between 2 pictures

TO-DO:

Frontend

• Add a javascript realtime fog/visibility analysis

Backend

• Package everything into a .deb
• Allow people to write their own camera wrapper
• Implement zone defined whitebalance

Installation

• Remove/template all the things to prevent any hardocded values specific to my setup
• Add steps to compile the mozjpeg libraries