Purpose

Audio baby monitors are cool and all, but how do you know when your 1-year old decides she’s big enough to climb out of the crib?

Enter the baby spycam.

This project follows:

• jacksonliam/mjpg-streamer (github)
• start-service-at-boot (Linode)

Download and build

Create a dev directory, clone the github link, and compile for install.

mkdir dev
cd dev
git clone https://github.com/jacksonliam/mjpg-streamer.git
cd mjpg-streamer/mjpg-streamer-experimental/
make
sudo make install

Test interactively

Test it:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=.
./mjpg_streamer -o "output_http.so -w ./www" -i "input_raspicam.so -x 1280 -y 720 -fps 15"

It works!

Create bash script

echo './mjpg_streamer -o "output_http.so -w ./www" -i "input_raspicam.so -x 1280 -y 720 -fps 15"' > my_mjpg_stream.sh
chmod +x my_mjpg_stream.sh 
./my_mjpg_stream.sh 

It still works.

In the end I needed to modify this script slightly to include the library path, and to use absolute file paths.

Here’s the complete file:

my_mjpg_stream.sh:

#!/bin/bash

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/pi/dev/mjpg-streamer/mjpg-streamer-experimental

/home/pi/dev/mjpg-streamer/mjpg-streamer-experimental/mjpg_streamer -o "output_http.so -w ./www" -i "input_raspicam.so -x 1280 -y 720 -fps 15"

link to /usr/bin

cd /usr/bin
sudo ln -s /home/pi/dev/mjpg-streamer/mjpg-streamer-experimental/my_mjpg_stream.sh my_mjpg_stream.sh

Create service

vim /lib/systemd/system/my-mjpg-stream.service

In this file, we write:

[Unit]
Description=Run pi webcam and stream it to 8080

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/bin/bash /usr/bin/my_mjpg_stream.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

This is the service file that will let us turn it into a daemon.

Copy it to the right place and set permissions:

sudo cp /lib/systemd/system/my-mjpg-stream.service /etc/systemd/system/my-mjpg-stream.service
sudo chmod 644 /etc/systemd/system/my-mjpg-stream.service 

Start the service:

sudo systemctl start my-mjpg-stream.serve
sudo systemctl status my-mjpg-stream.service

Done!