How to Align Camera for Motion Tracking Stream Area

The default motion stream image size is 320x240px. It is usually not big enough to cover the full size image area. The stream area is located in the center of the full image. As of version 11.00 a variable called IMAGE_SHOW_STREAM will allow showing the stream image detection area overlaid on the full size image.
IMPORTANT If you are using the pi-timolo web browser from a computer use the scroll bars to see the rest of the image since full image will usually be bigger than the browser window. I have reduce the motion tracking stream size to 320x240 (hard coded in pi-timilo.py line 206, 207. It was previously 640x480.

To upgrade run menubox.sh UPGRADE menu pick. It will upgrade to the latest pi-timolo.py. Your existing config.py file will not be changed. config.py.new will have a new variable called

IMAGE_SHOW_STREAM = False

You can simply add this new variable to your existing config.py and Change value to True to display a line box area on the full size image. This will allow aligning the camera. Change back to False when camera alignment is complete. In future I will take a look at cropping area out of stream image for motion tracking but this was an easy alternative.

If you want to return config.py back to default settings you can do the following commands in terminal session

cd ~/pi-timolo
cp config.py config.py.bak
cp config.py.new config.py

You would then need to transfer settings from the bak file to config.py file. It might be just as easy to add the new variable to your existing config.py file.

I would temporarily turn on timelapse to get a full image without needing to activate motion. To set timelapse and take image every 30 seconds edit config.py and change the following variables

TIMELAPSE_ON = True
TIMELAPSE_TIMER_SEC = 30

Use the web browser and look in recent/timelapse folder for latest images. After alignment is complete you return timelapse settings back to your desired values