Garden Cam for Raspberry Pi

This is an example of a simple garden (or whatever) monitoring camera for a Raspberry Pi. This assumes:

• You have a USB webcam (might work for the Pi camera, but I don't have one or this would be even easier 😄)
• You have a power source and an internet connection for the Pi (figure it out yourself)
• You have a Google Drive account and have set up gdrive at ~/Tools/gdrive
• You have set up volatile storage (see below, or change the $FILENAME variable if you don't care)

If that's all ready to go, edit cam.sh so that the GDRIVE_ROOT variable on line 5 is set to the ID of the parent directory in which you would like to store snapshots. Then set up a cron job to run cam.sh at whichever schedule makes sense to you.

You may want to play around with the settings used for fswebcam to find what suites your use case best.

Finally, if you're having a hard time figuring out how to setup gdrive, you may need to create the login token by running gdrive about first. Just follow the directions that come up.

Volatile Storage

Since this crontab with be reading and writing regularly, let's set up volatile storage. In a terminal:

# Edit /etc/fstab
sudo nano /etc/fstab

# Append to the end of the file: 
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,nosuid,size=80m 0 0

# Save and exit the file

# Reboot or remount: 
mount -a

If you don't want to do this, please be sure to change the $FILENAME variable in the script.

TODO:

• Provide an example crontab