Since we wrote the installation instructions for the CabCam project in August 2020, we have been fine-tuning the camera settings and made other improvements. Review the project page for the hardware we use for our camera cars and to get a better understanding about the software side of the setup.

The instructions on the project page are very detailed and several groups have built camera cars using them. We’re now making a disk image of our CabCam project available for others to use with the hope that this is an even easier way build a working camera car. The disk image comes as a 600MByte zip file with Raspian and mjpg-streamer preconfigured. Depending on your Internet connection speed, it will take a while to download. The download is available below.

This disk image is intended to be used with a Raspberry Pi Zero and the Raspberry Pi camera.

Setup and Usage

Make sure to unzip the disk image before writing the file to the SD card with a disk imaging tool of your choice.

After writing the disk image to the SD card, eject and re-insert the SD card. Edit the file wpa_supplicant.conf in the boot partition to enter the network name and password for your Wifi network. This file can be easily accessed from Windows, MacOS X, or Linux. The Raspberry Pi web site has more information about configuring Wifi for headless operation.

Finally, put the SD card into your Raspberry Pi and let it boot. The Raspberry Pi should acquire an IP address and come up on your Wifi. Give it a few minutes to do that. Many home routers have a handy client list feature listing all devices on your network with their IP address and what they identify as. The camera should identify as “cabcam1”.

Enter the IP address in your browser and it should come up with the default M-JPG Streamer Web page, which has various options for accessing the camera stream in different situations. The URL provided on the VideoLAN sub-page can be used to access the camera video as a Media Source in OBS Studio.

The image brings up SSH with the default password (user pi, password raspberry). We recommend to change the password.

The camera configuration can be changed by changing the parameters in the startcam.sh script in the pi home directory and rebooting the Pi.

This disk image contains software from the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Liam Jackson’s fork of the M-JPEG Streamer project under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License. This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.