RasRig (Software)

A collection of playbooks/scripts to use Raspberry Pi's to send video into OBS to create rich, multi-camera livestreams. See the blog post for design rationale, BOMs and printable parts.

The core tool being used here is ansible, which enables a single computer to control many other computers (in this case Raspberry Pi's), to install software and run commands.

The control node, is the machine sending commands, and the hosts (so Pi's) are the computers under control.

Getting Started

You'll need to install ansible. On the control node. This can be done with apt on Ubuntu with:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt install ansible

Dependencies to start streaming etc. will be installed on the hosts using the playbooks at runtime.

Run a playbook on a specific host with:

ansible-playbook start_streaming.yml -i hosts.yml --limit overhead-camera

On all hosts:

ansible-playbook start_streaming.yml -i hosts.yml

Ansible

This directory contains an ansible playbook and inventory file, as well as supporting scripts/services to be able to define where cameras are on the network and get them streaming.

Playbooks

| Playbook | Description | |-----------------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | take_still.yml | Stops the stream (if it's running), takes a photo, starts the stream back up (if it was running), and then pushes the file to the host running the playbook. The photo is then deleted from the remote. | | start_streaming.yml | Copies over scripts, and installs dependencies needed to get streaming. Installs the systemd service, and then starts the stream. | | stop_streaming.yml | Stops the livestream if it's installed and running. |

The inventory file, hosts.yml, describes my personal setup to serve as an example.

Raspberry Pi Notes

mjpg-streamer, found here is the heart of this project. It does not have support for the libcamera-style of Raspberry Pi Camera control, only the raspistill/raspivid styles of control.

There are a lot of problems with this. The biggest one being that mjpg-streamer is not reliably supported on modern version of Raspberry Pi OS.

I have tried to use some of the libcamera alternatives but none of them are remotely as good.

• ustreamer struggles above 30 fps with the HQ camera.
• arducam mjpg-stremer cannot rotate the image.
• camera-streamer didn't work for me at all.

Because of all of this, Raspberry Pi's running the streams should be running the Buster debian variant. I have had good luck with the 2022-04-04-raspios-buster-armhf-lite.img image.

Also, Pis newer than the Raspberry Pi 3B+ don't seem to work with this image. Or at least the 4 I had didn't work for some reason.