The goal of iVR is to record long-term footage, either offline or online, with information acquired from various sensor devices. This repository contains scripts and setups to turn your Raspberry Pi into a homebrew footage recorder. iVR might be used for the following purposes:

• Security Camera: for home, garage and warehouse
• Dashboard Camera: install at the front or rear of the vehicle
• Observation: landscape, plants, and animals

Note, however, that iVR is intended to be a DIY footage recording device and does NOT guarantee reliable footage recording.

The current iVR version only stores video files and does NOT have the ability to distribute live streaming. Also, audio recording is still unstable and is turned off by default.

• Raspberry Pi or Raspberry Pi Zero:
  • 512MB memory
  • H.264 hardware encoder
  • Single-core CPU will work but recommends quad-core model
  • Latest Raspberry Pi OS (raspbian)
    • It may be available for other Linux operating systems with a few modifications
• USB storage:
  • FAT32 or exFAT formatted
  • Recommends 64GB (requires about 280MB to 360MB per hour)
    • iVR log: 500MB max
    • tracklog: 8GB max
  • Flash memory, SSD, HDD, etc.
  • Use the one recognized as /dev/sda1
• Camera:
  • Many USB Web cameras will work, but you may need to modify the script in some cases
  • MIPI camera module is also possible by directly specifying the device file
• GPS Receiver
  • Optional
  • Compatible with gpsd
  • Possible to use without GPS receiver, then the time and location information will not be displayed.
• Speaker
  • Optional, but recommended to notify system errors and drives
  • USB, 3.5mm jack, HDMI, or bluetooth
• RTC Module
  • Optional, but recommended not to deviate the clock or GPS positioning too much if you are going to be using this offline or turning this on/off frequently.

Devices confirmed to work well:

• Raspberry Pi: 1B , 3B, 3B
• Storage: KIOXIA TransMemory
• Camera: Logitech C270n, C922n

The USB storage attached to the Raspberry Pi will be stored the following information:

• footage-nnnnnn-YYYYMMDDHH.avi - Video with time and location information on it.
• tracklog-YYYYMMDD.gpx - GPS positioning records.
• ivr-YYYYMMDD.log - Application log.

These files will be switched every hour or day. If the total size of the files exceeds the allowable size, they will be deleted in order starting with the oldest file.

The footage file is a AVI format that allows you to play back the video up to the point just before the interruption, even if there is a sudden power failure. This format can be played by Windows Standard Player and mac OS / Linux LVC. It can also be converted to MP4 by ffmpeg as follows:

$ ffmpeg -i footage-xxx.avi footage-xxx.mp4

GPS positioning records are saved in GPX format, which can be used by some location-based services such as Google Earth.

The end of the file is often broken by sudden power-off, but it's a plain text (XML) file and can be fixed manually :)

iVR assumes to be used headless, without a display or keyboard connected, in an environment that is not connected to the Internet. When an error or other event occurs, the speaker will be used to notify you. So it's recommended that you connect a small speaker. If you put a file named announce.wav in the bin/ directory, that it will be played before every notification.

Raspberry Pi doesn't have an RTC, so if it's not connected to a network (and cannot be synchronized with NTP server), the local time will deviate significantly when the power is turned on and off. The iVR has the ability to adjust the local time using the GPS time.

Attach the USB storage, USB camera, and GPS receiver. And your Raspberry Pi.

If you have just installed the Raspberry Pi OS, it's recommended that you update your firmware and system.

$ sudo apt-get update -y && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
$ sudo rpi-update

The iVR uses Ansible for its setup. You can setup locally on the Raspberry Pi's own localhost, or remotely from Windows/macOS/Linux etc.

If you want to configure iVR on your Raspberry Pi local, you will need to install git and ansible first. After then, The PATH will be added in the .profile so that you may need to do . .profile, or logout/login.

$ sudo apt install -y git python3-pip
$ pip3 install ansible
$ . ~/.profile

Both of local and remote, clone the iVR repository and edit startup.sh to set the appropriate data size limit for the USB storage to be used. For example, if you are using 128GB of USB storage, the values would be as follows:

$ git clone https://github.com/torao/iVR.git
$ cd iVR
$ vi files/bin/startup.sh
...
COORDINATE_OPTIONS =" --limit-footage 120G"
COORDINATE_OPTIONS =" --limit-tracklog 5G"

To configure iVR from the localhost of Raspberry Pi itself, run Ansible as follows:

$ ansible-playbook -i hosts --connection=local site.yml

To configure iVR from the remote machine, configure the Raspberry Pi so that you can login using ssh, and replace localhost in the hosts file with the hostname or IP address of the machine you want to setup.

$ vi hosts
[all]
192.168.xxx.yyy
...
$ ansible-playbook -i hosts site.yml

If the connection fails, run the following command to see if the connection is established correctly. You may need sshpass in your runtime environment.

$ ansible all -i hosts -m ping --ask-pass

It also possible to setup iVR by manually doing the steps described in site.yml. In this case, you could use regular Linux instead of Raspberry Pi. If you are doing this operation for the sake of learning Linux, doing everything manually may help you understand the system.

After Ansible has been successfully finished, making sure the camera and GPS receiver are connected and reboot your Raspberry Pi.

When iVR starts correctly, you should see the following three python processes running.

$ ps -ef | grep python
pi  778  1 83 01:08 ?  00:13:25 python3 /opt/ivr/bin/gpslog.py
pi  779  1  0 01:08 ?  00:00:00 python3 /opt/ivr/bin/coordinate.py
pi  780  1  0 01:08 ?  00:00:00 python3 /opt/ivr/bin/record.py

In addition, recording should have started and footage files and logs should have been generated in the /opt/ivr/data/ directory. If one of the python processes fails to start, please refer to /opt/ivr/data/ivr-YYYYMMDD.log or ~/ivr-boot.log.

$ espeak-ng "hello, world"

MIT License