3D Camera Client Software

This software is designed to run on the raspbery pi and use the raspbery pi camera, it should work on all versions of the hardware but it will be faster and more reliable with the newer devices.

Getting started

The first thing you need to do is setup a raspbery pi, ideally with a lite version of Raspbian. Once this is setup you should ssh into it. How to do this is outside of the scope of this setup guide.

The first thing you need to do once you have logged into the pi is to enable the camera using the setup utility.

The software needs nodejs to run, the raspbery pi will come with node installed but its mostlikly an old out of date version, the following commands can be used to replace it with something more modern. There are many ways to upgrade node, this is just one.

Upgrading to node v7

cd ~
wget https://nodejs.org/dist/v7.9.0/node-v7.9.0-linux-armv6l.tar.gz
tar -xvf node-v7.9.0-linux-armv6l.tar.gz
cd node-v7.9.0-linux-armv6l/
sudo cp -R * /usr/local/
sudo reboot

# Tidy up
cd ~
rm node-v7.9.0-linux-armv6l.tar.gz.gz
rm -r node-v7.9.0-linux-armv6l.tar.gz

# Update NPM
sudo npm install -g npm

Once node has been installed you can download the files for the client software.

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/ArthurGuy/3dCamera.git

The software can then be installed using the following commands

cd 3dCamera
npm install

Once this is complete you can test the software by running it using the following command

node app.js

Supervisor - Keeping the software running

Starting the software and keeping it running is the job of supervisor, this program will make sure the camera software allways runs, this can be installed using the following command.

sudo apt-get install git supervisor

Supervisor can then be setup with the 3d scanner application by copying the supplied config file into the final location using the following command

cp /home/pi/3dCamera/camera.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/camera.conf

You can now tell supervisor to identify the new config file and start running.

sudo supervisorctl reread
sudo supervisorctl update
sudo service supervisor restart

Now whenever the system starts up supervisor will start the camera application which will connect to the server software automatically.

Optional extra

The software can be updated using an update command built into the web ui, an alternative is to force an update whenever the raspbery pi boots up. If you wish to do this you should enter the following command, this will replace the default startup script with one that will carry out an update.

cp /home/pi/3dCamera/rc.local /etc/rc.local