Migrate from Raspbian to openSUSE aarch64 for motion detection camera
an invention by tjyrinki_suse
Updated over 2 years ago. 4 hacker ♥️. 1 follower.

Project Description

I have had a hobby project of running Raspberry Pi to record video when detecting motion, mostly catching rabbits and such on the yard.

I'm using the upstream's default offering Raspbian (or nowadays called also Raspberry Pi OS) together with motion software, but there have been a few problems which would be interesting to see if can be get to working better using openSUSE.

Motivations to seek alternatives include:

  • Raspbian buster (based on Debian 10) is stable, but the ffmpeg included is too old to support the hardware accelerated h.264 encoding. Software encoding speed is okayish with my RPi Zero 2 and RPi 3 Model A+, but still limiting.
  • Raspbian bullseye (based on Debian 11) would be fresh, but the migration from MMAL to libcamera causes problems at minimum due to v4l compatibility layer seeming unstable - and libcamera, regardless of some of its merits, causes incompatibilities and is unusable for the motion software.
  • If libcamera is in general stable eg in openSUSE (I have not checked yet whether openSUSE has migrated), other motion detection software could be considered as well - in the past there have been even interesting hacks utilizing the hardware encoder and reading its motion vectors to get essentially 0% CPU motion detection!
  • My RPi Zero 2 installation seems a bit unstable for unknown reasons (the other installation is has 1y+ uptime), making a good candidate to replace the software.

Goal for this Hackweek

The goal is to prepare an alternate boot environment using the same hardware but different software. Initially the idea would be to use openSUSE Leap 15.4, for which there is a repository offering ffmpeg 4.4 which is recent enough. At least first goal would be to setup the same motion software with the same config as currently, if possible, but if openSUSE already uses libcamera then a different approach will be needed.

Ultimately, the goal is to learn about Raspberry Pi, video interfaces and motion detection on openSUSE.

Resources

If you want to try to setup something similar, whether migrating or simply wanting to setup motion detection video recording, we could work together by exchanging experiences or ideas of what software to use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Specifications

https://github.com/Motion-Project/motion/

https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-imager

http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/packman/suse/openSUSELeap15.4/Essentials/aarch64/

http://billw2.github.io/pikrellcam/pikrellcam.html

Looking for hackers with the skills:

raspberrypi videoprocessing motiondetection opensuse

This project is part of:

Hack Week 21

Activity

  • over 2 years ago: clin liked this project.
  • over 2 years ago: ptesarik liked this project.
  • over 2 years ago: mbrugger liked this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tjyrinki_suse added keyword "opensuse" to this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tjyrinki_suse added keyword "raspberrypi" to this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tjyrinki_suse added keyword "videoprocessing" to this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tjyrinki_suse added keyword "motiondetection" to this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tjyrinki_suse liked this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tjyrinki_suse started this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tjyrinki_suse originated this project.


    • Comments

    • tjyrinki_suse
      over 2 years ago by tjyrinki_suse | Reply

      Finished the main hack week tasks, although there are always more things to be done.

      Blogged at https://timojyrinki.gitlab.io/hugo/post/2022-07-01-leap-on-rpi-zero2/ (also planet.o.o)

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