Sauron

Sauron is a Foscam compatible webcam daemon, written in Kotlin.

Features

• Multi-platform: Written in Kotlin, and thus compatible with any JVM platform
• Flexible inputs: Can run any command to take the next frame.
  • Out of the box, supports Raspberry PI camera using raspistill command.
• Support for standard webcam app integration (following e.g. the Foscam standard)
• MJPEG support for easy integration into e.g. dashboards or into analysis frameworks.

Installation

I'll provide way to create a Debian package at some point, but for now, here are the manual steps to get it built and installed:

Build

First, build runnable JAR file:

./gradlew sauron

The result is a file like sauron-0.1.jar. This file can be copied anywhere and run:

java -jar sauron-0.1.jar

Installation (Linux/Systemd)

The following are instructions for a Linux based system that has systemd support, especiall the Raspberry Pi:

First, create a directory to put sauron in, preferable under the main pi user's home directory:

mkdir -p /home/pi/sauron

Then copy the sauron-0.1.jar into it.

To support easy updates later, generate a symlink:

ln -s /home/pi/sauron/sauron-0.1.jar /home/pi/sauron/sauron.jar

With this in place, create the following systemd configuration as /lib/systemd/system/sauron.service:

[Unit]
Description=Sauron Service
After=multi-user.target

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=screen -dmS sauron java -jar /home/pi/sauron/sauron.jar
User=pi

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Make sure this file has the correct permissions:

sudo chmod 644 /lib/systemd/system/sauron.service

Note: This file will launch sauron inside a screen session, which is nice as it allows you to later ssh into the system and simply look at the running output using screen -r sauron.

Now activate the service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable sauron.service

Once you restart the system, Sauron should be running. To run it right away, run:

sudo systemctl start sauron.service