ZWO Astronomy Camera as IP Camera

Astronomy cameras are known for their high sensitivity and flexibility on whether to have IR pass through and bayer filters. This makes them a perfect fit as an IP camera, no matter for all sky camera, baby monitoring, or stealth night monitoring. This project enables us to use a ZWO camera, which I happen to have at hand, to act as an IP camera, so it could be connected with a DVR/NVR for continouous recording, or combined with other processing pipelines to provide more intelligent services (object detection etc.). This project was tested on a Raspberry Pi 3 and Python 3, but I don’t see a reason why it couldn’t work on Raspberry Pi 4 or Nvidia Jetson or Python 2.

Usage

  1. Download ZWO ASI camera SDK from their website for your OS. Extract the content and put it to this project folder. You can also put it elsewhere. Just need to change the SDK_PATH variable in main.py. If you want to execute the code without root privilege, please follow the instructions in the lib/README of the SDK.
  2. Use python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt to install dependencies, which only contain a python binding to ZWO SDK for now.
  3. Use python3 main.py to launch the monitor.
  4. Use http://

    :8000/stream.mjpg
     for the video stream, and http://

    :8000/latest_full.jpg
     for the latest captured image.

  5. This script can also be registered as a service, which automatically starts on system boot. We provide camera.service as a reference. In order to set it up, one could 1) change the WorkingDirectory in the camera.service file, and 2) run enable_service.sh with root privilege.

使用ZWO天文相机作为IP相机

天文相机拥有比普通相机高得多的灵敏度和灵活性。 比如可以透过红外线，或者没有贝尔滤镜（黑白相机）。 所以天文相机其实非常适合当IP相机来做监控，比如做全天相机监测云量和流星，监控小孩或者在没有红外补光灯的情况下在夜里监控。 这个项目可以让ZWO天文相机作为IP相机使用，比如可以和DVR/NVR录制设备连起来持续录像，或者和其他算法/工具连起来提供物体检测等智能应用。 本项目在树莓派 3 + Python 3上测试通过。但它应该也可以在树莓派4，NVidia Jetson，和Python 2上面直接跑。

使用方法

  1. 从官网下载ZWO ASI相机SDK（需要点进“二次开发”）。解压到本项目的文件夹下。其实也可以把SDK目录放到其他地方，只要把main.py里面的SDK_PATH改一下就好。有一个小坑是需要看一下SDK的lib/README，跟着上面的步骤做一个简单的安装，这样才能不用root权限就可以运行。
  2. 用python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt安装依赖。
  3. 用python3 main.py启动程序。
  4. 用http://

    :8000/stream.mjpg
    来访问视频串流，用http://

    :8000/latest_full.jpg
    来访问最新的静态jpg图像。

  5. 这个脚本还可以作为一个系统服务开机自启动。要安装系统服务，我们需要1) 把camera.service文件里面的WorkingDirectory改为实际存放的目录位置，2) 用管理员权限（sudo）执行enable_service.sh.

GitHub

https://github.com/grapeot/ZWOIPCam