Hog-Cam

Some simple node.js based scripts for recording my hedge-hogs running around at night.

What do I need?

• Raspberry Pi 2
• Raspberry No-IR camera
• Wi-Pi or some kind of network connection.
• Somewhere to store the videos (i mounted my NAS).

Setup

• Flash regular Raspbian onto an SD card (not Noobs) and boot it up. I used a tool called 'rufus' to do this on windows.
• Run raspi-config to the camera on.
• Clone this repo into the ~/ home directory.
• Run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Get Node

From the node docs:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_5.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

Mount storage

I mounted my network storage solution, you can do that by adding this to /etc/fstab

//<ip>/<share> /mnt/nas-videos cifs username=<someuser>,password=<password>  0  0

Install PM2

Use sudo so it can be installed globaly.

sudo npm install -g pm2

Then lets add PM2 to run on startup

sudo pm2 startup ubuntu

This will ask you to run a more specific command. Copy and paste this command.

Auto-start Hogcam

PM2 is now going to start when the pi boots up, so we can piggy-back by auto starting hogcam when PM2 starts:

pi@raspberrypi:~/hogcam $ pm2 start ~/hogcam/index.js --name="hogcam" --watch
[PM2] Starting /home/pi/hogcam/index.js in fork_mode (1 instance)
[PM2] Done.
┌──────────┬────┬──────┬─────┬────────┬─────────┬────────┬─────────────┬──────────┐
│ App name │ id │ mode │ pid │ status │ restart │ uptime │ memory      │ watching │
├──────────┼────┼──────┼─────┼────────┼─────────┼────────┼─────────────┼──────────┤
│ hogcam   │ 0  │ fork │ 836 │ online │ 0       │ 0s     │ 17.605 MB   │  enabled │
└──────────┴────┴──────┴─────┴────────┴─────────┴────────┴─────────────┴──────────┘
 Use `pm2 show <id|name>` to get more details about an app

I've enabled --watch here so I can edit index.js and refresh the service faster. You don't necessarily need to do this.

This process is now configured to restart whenever it crashes or stops. Finally we need to save the PM2 state so that the process resumes on restart of the raspberry pi.

pm2 save