Raspberry Pi Webcam in Apex Fusion

Tastee · Nov 25, 2018

All, I just have to share my birthday present from my son. I have been trying to get a webcam connected to my Apex dashboard for a while now but the camera I was using did not seem to be suitable for port forwarding - or if it was, I couldn’t figure it out!

So for my birthday last Friday my son built me TasteeCam - a Raspberry Pi based webcam printed from his 3D printer.

Linked in Apex Fusion.

Here is the feed: 110.20.69.122:8080/camera/livestream.m3u8

If anyone wants any of the details of the camera please let me know.

Bob Escher · Nov 25, 2018

Tastee said:
All, I just have to share my birthday present from my son. I have been trying to get a webcam connected to my Apex dashboard for a while now but the camera I was using did not seem to be suitable for port forwarding - or if it was, I couldn’t figure it out!

So for my birthday last Friday my son built me TasteeCam - a Raspberry Pi based webcam printed from his 3D printer.

Linked in Apex Fusion.

Here is the feed: 110.20.69.122:8080/camera/livestream.m3u8

If anyone wants any of the details of the camera please let me know.

So since it’s PI based how does it hook into the APEX

Tastee · Nov 25, 2018

Bob Escher said:
So since it’s PI based how does it hook into the APEX

The camera itself is not directly connected to the Apex controller. It is simply sitting on a cabinet next to the tank.

The video stream it is presenting is port forwarded through my router and the URL above is the external address, which I have then added into Apex Fusion as an MPEG-4 (H.264) stream.

I had to tune down the video size to get this to work - not sure if that is a limitation on my side (upload bandwidth) or the Fusion side, or both. A 240x320 stream seems to work ok.

Bob Escher · Nov 25, 2018

Duh, I am sorry I figured that, what are the specs

Tastee · Nov 25, 2018

I’m new to this myself, and my son built it, so bear with me...

The device is just a small Raspberry Pi unit, running headless, connected to my Wifi - he configured that by dropping a configuration file directly onto the SD card that is used for the file system and letting it boot. I’d have to google what he did there again, but it seems a fairly well documented and standard process.

It is running Raspberry Pi Zero I believe, and is using raspi-live for the streaming. This site explains how raspi-live is used.

https://medium.com/@jaredtoddpetersen/home-security-live-streaming-with-raspberry-pi-f9293efca7ba

Seems pretty easy to configure and use but I’m sure it took my son some trial and error to get it working perfectly. I have been able to SSH into the device to change configuration, reboot etc.