Raspberry Pi Based Camera Stream

This article is a part of a mini-series that aims to assist in setting up your raspberry pi to send camera streams to your google drive. First and foremost, on your raspberry pi we need to make some installations. I’ve found it much easier to install vscode onto the rpi especially when using the remote explorer to ssh and develop code remotely. To do that you first need to run the following:

    sudo apt update
    sudo apt upgrade

To install vscode on the rpi follow the instructions outlined in this *tutorial.*

Rclone

Rclone is an open source command-line program that assists in managing files on cloud storage. It currently supports over 70 cloud storage products and numerous transfer protocols. It allows you to mount any cloud filesystem on Windows pc, linux and even macOS. It also can serve those files over transfer protocols like FTP and HTTP.

In this tutorial we’ll be using rclone to transfer the video streams into Google Drive. To do that you’ll need to first install rclone onto your raspberry pi.

sudo -v ; curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash
[...]
rclone v1.62.2 has successfully installed.
Now run "rclone config" for setup. Check https://rclone.org/docs/ for more details.

After installing, run rclone config on the terminal. Type “n” as the option and name your remote instance.

A menu of cloud platforms will be shown, choose the number corresponding to google drive. As of the current version it’s 22.

Follow the below steps when configuring:

Google Application Client Id - leave blank normally.
client_id>
Google Application Client Secret - leave blank normally.
client_secret>
Scope that rclone should use when requesting access from drive.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Full access all files, excluding Application Data Folder.
   \ "drive"
 2 / Read-only access to file metadata and file contents.
   \ "drive.readonly"
   / Access to files created by rclone only.
 3 | These are visible in the drive website.
   | File authorization is revoked when the user deauthorizes the app.
   \ "drive.file"
   / Allows read and write access to the Application Data folder.
 4 | This is not visible in the drive website.
   \ "drive.appfolder"
   / Allows read-only access to file metadata but
 5 | does not allow any access to read or download file content.
   \ "drive.metadata.readonly"
scope> 1

Service Account Credentials JSON file path - needed only if you want use SA instead of interactive login.
service_account_file>
Remote config
Use web browser to automatically authenticate rclone with remote?
 * Say Y if the machine running rclone has a web browser you can use
 * Say N if running rclone on a (remote) machine without web browser access
If not sure try Y. If Y failed, try N.
y) Yes
n) No
y/n> y
If your browser doesn't open automatically go to the following link: http://127.0.0.1:53682/auth
Log in and authorize rclone for access
Waiting for code...
Got code
Configure this as a Shared Drive (Team Drive)?
y) Yes
n) No
y/n> n

In the step after service_account_file, click on the link to authorize the rclone connection with your google account.

Connecting to your google drive from your local rpi directory:

Now that we’ve configured our rclone remote connection and have established a connection to our personal google drive, it’s time to mount our google drive to our local directory (on the rpi). To do that go ahead and first verify the validity of the configuration:

#Assuming that the name of the remote connection established in the rclone 
#config is remote-camera
rclone ls remote-camera:

You should be able to see the list of files within your google drive. This means you’ve successfully connected to your google drive using rclone. To mount your google drive to a specific local directory:

• First create the directory itself:

mkdir camera-stream

• Use the command below where you give the path of the local directory you would like to mount the google drive to.

 rclone mount --allow-non-empty --vfs-cache-mode full remote-camera:/ /home/user/Desktop/camera-stream/

If you have a specific folder within your gdrive that you’d like to mount use the below where <folder> is the folder within your main gdrive:

rclone mount --allow-non-empty --vfs-cache-mode full remote-camera:<folder>/ /home/user/Desktop/camera-stream/

In the next article, we’ll be creating a script that captures videos and syncs them to the mounted gdrive.

Resources:

• https://www.baeldung.com/linux/google-drive-guide#2-rclone
• https://rclone.org/drive/