Do you know someone who hails from the strange land of Django development? Where there are code based settings files, is customary to use a ORM for all database calls, and classes reign supreme. It’s a dangerous place that sits perilously close to the Javalands. Most who originally traveled there were told there would be riches, but they lost themselves along the way and simply need our help to come home again.
Classless classes
The first bad habit that must be broken is the horrendous overuse of classes. While classes are considered the building blocks of most object oriented languages, Python has the power of first-class functions and a clean namespacing system which negates many the usual reasons for classes.
When using Django’s framework, where a lot of its powerful operations are performed by subclassing, classes actually makes sense. When creating a small class for a one use instance in a library or script it’s most likely simply over complicating and slowing down your code.
Let’s use an example I have seen recently, where someone wanted to run a command, but needed to know if a custom shell wrapper existed before running the command.
Most of this class is setup and unnecessary. Especially if the state of the system won’t change while the script is running (i.e. if “/bin/secure_shell” is added or removed during execution). Let’s clean this up a little.
Shorter, cleaner, faster, easier to read. It doesn’t get much better than that. Now if the system state may change, you would need to throw the shell check inside the command itself, but is also possible.
To learn more view the great PyCon video entitled “stop writing classes.” The video goes over more details of why classes can stink up your code.
Help me ORM-Kenobi!
Now onto probably the hardest change that will have the most significant impact. If you or someone you know has mesothelioma learned how to interact databases by using an ORM (Django’s Models) and don’t know how to hand write SQL queries, it’s time to make an effort to learn.
An ORM is always going to be slower than its raw SQL equivalent, and in a many cases it will be much much slower. ORMs are brilliant, but still can’t always optimize queries. Even if they do, they then load the retrieved data into Python objects which takes longer and uses more memory. Their abstraction also comes at the price of not always being clear on what is actually happening under the hood.
I am not suggesting never using an ORM. They have a lot of benefits for simple datasets such as ease of development, cross database compatibility, custom field transforms and so on. However if you don’t know SQL to begin with, your ORM will most likely be extremely inefficient, under-powered and the SQL tables will be non-normalized.
For example, one of the worst sins in SQL is to use SELECT * in production. Which is the default behavior for ORM queries. In fact, the Django main query page doesn’t even go over how to limit columns returned!
Now, I am not going to tell when to use an ORM or not, or link to a dozen other articles that fight over this point further. All I want is for everyone that thinks they should use an ORM to at least sit down and learn a moderate amount of SQL before making that decision.
Text Config is King
When was the last time you had to convince an IT admin to update a source code file? Yeah, good luck with that.
By separate settings from code you gain a lot of flexibility and safety. It’s the difference between “Mr. CEO, you need the default from email changed? So for our Django docker deploy we’ll need to make the change in code, commit it to the feature branch, PR it to develop, pray we don’t have other changes and require a hotfix for this instead, then PR again for release to master, wait for the CI/CD to finish and then the auto-deployment should be good by end of the day.” vs. “One sec, let me update the config file and restart it. Okay, good to go.”
“Code based setting files are more powerful!” – Old Sith Proverb
That’s the path to the dark side. If you think you need programmatic help in a configuration file, your logic is in the wrong place. A config file shouldn’t validate itself, not have if statements, nor have to find the absolute path to the relative directory structured the user entered.
The best configuration handling I have seen are text files that are read, sanity checked, loaded into memory and have paths extrapolated as needed, run any necessary safety checks, then any additional logic run. This allows almost anyone to update a setting safely and quickly.
The basic design is to allow for overrides on runtime based on environment variables, which is very common and good practice. However, the way this example has been implemented honestly scares me. If the json loads fails, you are going to have an exception raised, in your freaking settings file. Which may even happen before logging is setup, project dependent.
Second, say you have “APP_ALLOWED_HOSTS” (or worse “APP_DATABASES”) set to an empty string accidentally. Then the “ALLOWED_HOSTS” would be set to [""] !
Finally spending all that work to grab environment variables makes it very unclear where to actually update the settings. For example, to update the ALLOWED_HOSTS you would have to change the default in the os.environ.get which wouldn’t make much sense to someone who didn’t know Python.
The safe way
Why not a much more easily readable file, in this case a YAML file paired with python-box (lots of other options as well, this was simply fast to write and easy to digest.)
Wonderful, now we have a super easy to digest config file that would be easy to update. Let’s implement the parser for it.
import os
from box import Box
config = Box.from_yaml(filename="config.yaml")
config.debug |= os.getenv("DEBUG") == "1"
# Doing it this way will make sure it exists and is not empty
if os.getenv("ALLOWED_HOSTS"):
# This is overwritten like in settings.py above instead of extended
config.allowed_hosts = os.getenv("ALLOWED_HOSTS").split(",")
if os.getenv("APP_DATABASES"):
try:
databases = Box.from_json(filename=os.environ["APP_DATABASES"])
except Exception as err:
# Can add proper logging or print message as well / instead of exception
raise Exception(f"Could not load database set from {os.environ['APP_DATABASES']}: {err}")
else:
config.databases.extend(databases)
Tada! Now this is a lot easier to understand the logic that is happening, much easier to update the config file, as well as a crazy amount safer.
Now the only thing to argue about with your coworkers is what type of config file to use. cfg is old-school, json doesn’t support comments, yaml is slow, toml is fake ini, hocon is overcomplicated, and you should probably just stop coding if you’re even considering xml. But no matter which you go with, they are all better (except xml) than using a language based settings file.
Wrap Up
So you’ve heard me prattle on and on of the dangers Djangoers might bring with them to your next project, but also keep in mind the good things they will bring. Django helps people learn how to document well, keep a rigid project structure and has a very warm and supportive community that we should all strive to match.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed and found this informative or at least amusing!
I was the first person to become a Certified Kubernetes Application Developer at my company, so I naturally have received a lot of questions from my coworkers about it and how to pass it.
Of course, I told them you need to practice. And you need to have a fairly good idea about how different resources in Kubernetes work together. You also should repeat all of the hands-on exercises that I helped to create until you can do it all from muscle memory.
But trying to do all of the required tasks for the exam in two hours is hard. Especially if you have not been using Kubernetes for a long time. So, if your goal is to pass the CKAD exam, here is my suggestion:
Use Your Resources!!!
The CKAD exam is an open-book test. Although you are not allowed anything on or near your desk and no physical books are allowed, you are allowed one tab open to the test and one tab open to the Official Kubernetes Documentation page.
Using the documentation is a good way to look up anything that you have forgotten, like how to use a ConfigMap inside of a Pod, or how much to indent a field in your manifest.
But here is an even better plan:
Know what you are expected to know, and set your browser up for success with the Kubernetes Documentation.
So first question is:
What topics are you expected to know?
Thankfully, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has put together an outline of “Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities that a Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) can be expected to demonstrate.” If you want to see it on their GitHub page, take a look at this link:
The information provided in this outline is a good starting point. But it does not show you where to go to find this information.
Links to Use During the CKAD exam
Below are all of the categories and specific topics that you will be tested on during the CKAD exam, as well as links to the official documentation that you can use during the exam.
These are also excellent links to read through and practice with as you prepare for exam day.
13% – Core Concepts
You need to understand what the core components of a Kubernetes cluster are and how they interact with each other.
You need to be able to comfortably use Labels and Selectors inside of your Pods in order to get Deployments, Jobs, and other resources to work with your Pods.
Instead of searching through the Kubernetes documentation to try to find these topics, do yourself a favor: remove all of those old bookmarks you haven’t looked at in six months and prepare your browser by bookmarking every single one of the links above and any other Kubernetes Documentation that you find useful.
Step 1 Download Alta3’s CKAD BookmarksNote: This is really an HTML file. But browsers think they have to display all html files, so in order to download the file, it has to have a non .html file extension, hence the .download. If you would prefer to use your browser to view the original html, you can click here.
Step 2 Rename the fileRemove the .download file extension from the file name.
Step 3 Import ALL THE BOOKMARKS YOU NEED TO PASS THE CKAD
Once you do that, you are essentially walking in to an open-book test with your book in hand and all of the answers marked.
This article is meant to go over the basics of calling an API via Python, as well as a critique of a top google result I recently ran across. We will start by using Robinhood’s undocumented API, as I saw this article that had python code so bad I had to try and fix it.
Also, because I can get us each a free stock if you sign up with this Robinhood referral link (seems to be usually around a $10 stock, but they like to advertise you might get Facebook or Visa.)
Which is a great use of curl. However, then the author simply decided to wrap it up in a subprocess call and manually parsed the output. He then states “You could also use PYCurl but I didn’t feel like learning it.” Well, thankfully there is no need to learn it.
How to interact with a REST API, the basic GET and POST
The most common text based web APIs are JSON REST-like nowadays. I add the “like” because there are usually cases a company does not fully stick to the standard, and to be honest is a good decision a lot of the time. Thankfully that doesn’t usually change the behavior of the most simple calls of GET and POST.
A properly implemented GET call on the server’s side won’t change anything on their server. So they are best to practice with. It is possible to do this all with pure python, however the requests library is so well known and has exactly what we want already, so we will stick to that library for the examples. To install it, simply pip install requests.
Example GET call
import requests
response = requests.get('https://api.robinhood.com')
# Check to make sure we got 'good' response, aka in HTTP code 2XX range
if response.ok:
# Display the result of the parsed json
print(response.json())
This should simply print out {}.
Next I thought it would be a good idea to try and log in using that article’s example login. If you don’t have an account (not necessary), you can sign up here which uses a referral link, gives you and me both a free random stock.
404
<h1>Not Found</h1><p>The requested resource was not found on this server.</p>
Oh gosh darn it. Not only did the author have bad python code, they have outdated examples! How dare they! (*quickly scans my most recent articles for anything obviously outdated*)
Now we get a quick lesson on the dangers of using undocumented APIs. They have absolutely no guarantees. Anything can change at anytime or even remove access to them. In this case, some people reversed engineered how to login to robinhood using a different endpoint, and have an unofficial API wrapped around it.
So for now, lets use Postman’s excellent echoAPI that will return what you send it. This time, lets put it in a more reusable function.
Example (good) POST call
import requests
api_root = 'https://postman-echo.com'
def post(path='/post', payload=None, timeout=10, **request_args):
response = requests.post(f'{api_root}/{path}',
json=payload, timeout=timeout, **request_args)
if response.ok:
return response.json()
raise Exception(f'error while calling "{path}", returned status "{response.status_code}" with message: "{response.text}"')
print(post(payload={'username': 'chris'}))
The endpoint will return a JSON object, and requests will automatically translate that into a python dictionary when called with .json() on the response.
Lot of fluff, but it is nice that Postman’s API spells out exactly what that endpoint receives. For example, you can test sending form data by changing the post parameter call from json to data.
Now this is doing a better job of checking response and using much more pythonic methods. But let’s take it one step further and do better error catching. Because if this is something you are putting into a bigger program, you probably have custom exceptions and want to be able to catch them in a certain way.
This is going to be a little exception heavy, but is showcasing all the ways you might need to deal with certain errors. I would probably only have one wrapper around the call and the parsing JSON personally, but it is really program dependent.
import requests
api_root = 'https://postman-echo.com'
class MyError(Exception):
"""Exception for anything in my program"""
class MyConnectionIssue(MyError):
"""child exception for issues with connections"""
def post(path='/post', payload=None, timeout=10, **request_args):
try:
response = requests.post(f'{api_root}/{path}', json=payload, timeout=timeout, **request_args)
except requests.Timeout:
raise MyConnectionIssue(f'Timeout of {timeout} seconds reached while calling "{path}"') from None
except requests.RequestException as err:
raise MyConnectionIssue(f'Error while calling {path}: {err}')
else:
if response.ok:
try:
return response.json()
except ValueError:
raise MyError(f'Expected output from {path} was not in JSON format. Output: {response.text}')
raise MyError(f'error while calling "{path}", returned status "{response.status_code}" with message: "{response.text}"')
print(post(payload={'username': 'chris'}))
In the terrible code below, we see the other article’s code manually parsing JSON output. Please for the love of all that is holy do not copy!
import subprocess
class data():
def __init__(self, stock):
parameter_list = ['open', 'high', 'low', 'volume', 'average_volume', 'last_trade_price', 'previous_close']
# replacing CURL call
out = '{"open": 54 "high": 55 "low": 52 "volume": 6000 "average_volume": 6000 "last_trade_price": 52 "previous_close": 54 "}'
# back to copied code
string = out
for p in parameter_list:
parameter = p
if parameter in string:
x = 0
output = ''
iteration = 0
for i in string:
if i != parameter[x]:
x = 0
if i == parameter[x]:
x = x+1
if x == len(parameter):
eowPosition = iteration
break
iteration = iteration + 1
target_position = eowPosition + 4
for i in string[target_position:]:
if i == '"':
break
elif i == 'u':
output = 'NULL'
break
else:
output = output+i
if output != 'NULL':
output = float(output)
if p == 'open':
self.open = output
if p == 'high':
self.high = output
if p == 'low':
self.low = output
if p == 'volume':
self.volume = output
if p == 'average_volume':
self.average_volume = output
if p == 'last_trade_price':
self.current = output
if p == 'previous_close':
self.close = output
XIV = data('XIV')
print('Current price: ', XIV.current)
So let’s do a critique starting from the top. class data(): First, classes should be CamelCase, second, this is a single function, shouldn’t even be a class. However does make a tiny bit of sense considering they are basically using it as a namespace, but there are better ways.
Next is them using subprocess to do a curl command instead of the built in urllib or requests. (Omitted so this code runs.)
Then onto string = out which is just…why? No reason to copy it to a new variable. Just name it what you want in the first place.
Finally the for loop that actually parses the JSON. Which is just painful to look at. If you ever need to parse JSON, without using requests method, just use the built-in json library!
import json
data = json.loads('{"open": 54}')
print(data["open"])
# 54
Bam, 42 lines into 3.
Finishing on a high note
Now for as much grief as I am giving this author, I also respect him a lot. He was able to accomplish what he wanted to achieve using Python, a language he had little experience with. To his credit he was clear up front that “I’m not an expert in stock trading nor coding so I can’t say the code is the cleanest”.
He also was willing to write up an article on how to do it for others, which most people don’t dream of doing, so in all earnestness, good job Spencer!
Last mention, free stock (legit actual money) from robinhood, just use this referral!
Raspberry Pi’s are wonderful little computers, just sometimes they lack the umph to get stuff done. That may change with the new Raspberry Pi 4, but what to do with all those old ones? Or how about that pile of old webcams? Well this article will help turn all those into a full on security system. (Can also use a raspberry pi camera if you got one!)
Other posts I have read on this subject often only use motion to capture detection events locally. Sometimes they go a bit further and set the Raspberry PI to stream MJPEG as an IP camera. Or set up MotionEyeOS and make it into a singular video surveillance system.
With our IP camera, we are going to take it further and encode the video stream locally. Then we will send it over the network via rtsp. This will save huge amounts of bandwidth! It also does not require the client to re-encode the stream before saving, distributing the work. That way we can also hook it into a larger security suite without draining any of its resources, in this case I will use Blue Iris.
Now, the first thing I am going to do is discourage you. If you don’t already have a Pi and a webcam or pi camera for the cause, don’t run out to buy them just for this. It’s just not economical. A 1080p WiFi camera that has has ONVIF capabilities can be had for less than $50. So why do this at all? Well because 1.) It’s all under your control and no worry about Chinaware, 2.) If you already got the equipment, it’s another free security eye, and 3.) It’s fun.
Update: If you’re just looking for results, check out my helper script that does all the work for you!
Not going to go into too much detail here. If you haven’t already, download Raspbian and get it onto a SD Card. (I used raspbian buster for this tutorial) If you aren’t going to connect a display and keyboard to it, make sure to add an empty file named ssh on the root of the boot (SD Card) drive. That way you can just SSH to the raspberry pi via command line or PuTTY on Windows.
# Default settings
host: raspberrypi
username: pi
password: raspberry
To start with, we need a place for ffmpeg to connect to for the rtsp connection. Most security systems expect to connect to a rstp server, instead of listening as a server themselves, so we need a middleman.
There are a lot of rstp server options out there, I wanted to go with a lightweight one we can just run on the pi itself that is easy to install and run easily. This is what I run at my own house, so don’t think I’m skimping out for this post 😉
UPDATE: I have stopped using the below server, and instead use rtsp-simple-server, which has ARM builds per-compiled. This is what is used with the helper script. (Not because the Node based one gave me issues, just this other one is much more lightweight and easy to install.)
First of, we need to install Node JS. The easiest way I have found is to use the pre-created scripts to add the proper package links to the apt system for us.
If you are on an arm6 based system, such as the pi zero, you will need to do just a little extra work to install Node. For arm7 systems, like anything Raspberry Pi 3 or newer, we will use Node 12. Find out your arm version with uname -a command and seeing if the string “arm6” or “arm7” appears.
Now, lets install Node JS and other needed libraries, such as git and coffeescript. If you want to view the script itself before running it, it is available to view here.
Once that is complete, we want to download the node rtsp server code and install all it’s dependencies. Note, I am assuming you are doing this in the root of your home folder, which will later use as the base for the directory for the service.
cd ~
git clone https://github.com/iizukanao/node-rtsp-rtmp-server.git --depth 1
cd node-rtsp-rtmp-server
npm install -d
Now you should be good to go, you can test it out by running:
sudo coffee server.coffee
It takes about 60 seconds or more to start up, so give it minute before you will see any text. Example output is below.
2019-12-16 14:24:18.465 attachRecordedDir: dir=file app=file
(node:6812) [DEP0005] DeprecationWarning: Buffer() is deprecated ...
2019-12-16 14:24:18.683 [rtmp] server started on port 1935
2019-12-16 14:24:18.691 [rtsp/http/rtmpt] server started on port 80
Simple make sure it starts up and then you can stop it by hitting Ctrl+c At this point you can also go into the server.coffee file and edit it to your hearts content, however I do keep it standard myself.
Create rtsp server service
You probably want this to always start this on boot, so lets add it as a systemd service. Copy and paste the following code into /etc/systemd/system/rtsp_server.service.
Now we can start it up via the service, and enable it to start on boot.
sudo systemctl start rtsp_server
# Can make sure it works with sudo systemctl status rtsp_server
sudo systemctl enable rtsp_server
Compile FFMPEG with Hardware Acceleration
If you are just using the raspberry pi camera, or another one with h264 or h265 built in support, you can use the distribution version of ffmpeg instead.
UPDATE: The built in FFmpeg now had hardware acceleration built in, so you can skip the compilation, or use my helper script to compile it for you with a lot of extras.
This is going to take a while to make. I suggest reading a good blog post or watching some Red vs Blue while it builds. This guide is just small modifications from another one. We are also adding libfreetype font package so we can add text (like a datetime) to the video stream, as well as the default libx264 so that we can use it with the Pi Camera if you have one.
sudo apt-get install libomxil-bellagio-dev libfreetype6-dev libmp3lame-dev checkinstall libx264-dev fonts-freefont-ttf libasound2-dev -y
cd ~
git clone https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg.git --depth 1
cd FFmpeg
sudo ./configure --arch=armel --target-os=linux --enable-gpl --enable-omx --enable-omx-rpi --enable-nonfree --enable-libfreetype --enable-libx264 --enable-libmp3lame --enable-mmal --enable-indev=alsa --enable-outdev=alsa
# For old hardware / Pi zero remove the `-j4`
sudo make -j4
When that is finally done, run the steps below that will install it. We take the additional precaution of turning it into a standard system package and hold it so we don’t overwrite our ffmpeg version.
If you haven’t already, plug the webcam into the raspberry pi. Then we are going to use video4linux2 to discover what it’s capable of.
v4l2-ctl --list-devices
Mine lists my webcam and two paths it’s located at. Sometimes a camera will have multiple devices for different types of formats it supports, so it’s a good idea to check each one out.
Now we need to see what resolutions and FPS it can handle. Be warned MJPEG streams are much more taxing to encode them some of their counterparts. In this example we are going to specifically try to find YUYV 4:2:2 streams, as they are a lot easier to encode. (Unless you see h264, then use that!)
In my small testing group, MJPEG streams averaged only 70% of the FPS of the YUYV, while running the CPU up to 60%. Comparatively, YUYV encoding only took 20% of the CPU usage on average.
v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 --list-formats-ext
This pumps out a lot of info. Basically you want to find the subset under YUYV and figure out which resolution and fps you want. Here is an example of some of the ones my webcam supports.
I am going to be using the max resolution of 1280×720 and the highest fps of 10. Now if it looks perfect as is, you can skip to the next section. Though if you need to tweak the brightness, contrast or other camera settings, read on.
Image tweaks
Let’s figure out what settings we can play with on the camera.
Plenty of options, excellent. Now, if you don’t have a method to look at the camera display just yet, come back to this part after you have the live stream going. You can change these settings while it is going thankfully.
The main problems I had with my camera was that it was a little dark and liked to auto-focus every 5~10 seconds. So I added the following lines of code to my rc.local file, but there are various way to run commands on startup.
# I added these lines right before the exit 0
# dirty hack to make sure v4l2 has time to initialize the cameras
sleep 10
v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 --set-ctrl focus_auto=0
v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 --set-ctrl focus_absolute=12
v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 --set-ctrl brightness=135
Now onto the fun stuff!
Real Time Encoding
Now we are going to use hardware accelerated ffmpeg library h264_omx to encode the webcam stream. That is, unless you happen to already be using a camera that supports h264 already. Like the built-in raspberry pi camera. If you are lucky enough to have one, you can just copy the output directly to the rtsp stream.
# Only for cameras that support h264 natively!
ffmpeg -input_format h264 -f video4linux2 -video_size 1920x1080 -framerate 30 -i /dev/video0 -c:v copy -an -f rtsp rtsp://localhost:80/live/stream
If at any point you receive the error ioctl(VIDIOC_STREAMON) failure : 1, Operation not permitted, go into raspi-config and up the video memory (memory split) to 256 and reboot.
In the code below, make sure to change the -s 1280x720 to your video resolution (can also use -video_size instead of -s) and both -r 10 occurrences to your frame rate (can also use -framerate).
So lets brake this down. The first part is telling ffmpeg what to expect from your device, -i /dev/video0. Which means all those arguments must go before the declaration of the device itself.
We are making clear that we only want the yuyv format as it is best available for my two cameras, yours may be different. Then specifying what resolution and fps we want it at. Be warned, that if you set one of them wrong, it may seem like it works (still encodes) but will give an error message to look out for:
[video4linux2] The V4L2 driver changed the video from 1280x8000 to 1280x800
[video4linux2] The driver changed the time per frame from 1/30 to 1/10
The next section is our conversion parameters.
-c:v h264_omx -r <your framerate> -b:v 2M
Here -c:v h264_omx we are saying the video codex to use h264, with the special omx hardware encoder. We are then telling it what the frame rate will be out as well, -r 10, and specifying the quality with -b:v 2M (aka bitrate) which determines how much bandwidth will be used when transmitting the video. Play around with different settings like -b:v 500k to see where you want it to be at. You will need a higher bitrate for higher resolution and framerate, and a lot less for lower resolution.
After that, we are telling it to disable audio with -an for the moment. If you do want audio, there is an optional section below going over how to enable that.
-f rtsp rtsp://localhost:80/live/stream
Finally we are telling it where to send the video, and to send it in the expected rtsp format (rstp is the video wrapper format, the video itself is still mp4). Notice that with the rstp server we can have as many camera with their own sub url, so instead of live/stream at the end could be live/camera1 and live/camera2.
Adding audio
Optional, not included in my final service script
As most webcams have built-in microphones, it makes it easy to add it to our stream if you want. First we need to identify our audio device.
arecord -l
You should get a list of possible devices back, in this case only my webcam is showing up as expected. If you have more than one, make sure you check out the ffmpeg article on “surviving the reboot” so they don’t get randomly re-ordered.
**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 1: CinemaTM [Microsoft® LifeCam Cinema(TM)], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
Notice it says card 1 at the very being of the webcam, and specifically device 0, that is the ID we are going to use to reference it with ffmpeg. I’m going to show the full command first like before and break it down again.
So to start with, we are adding a new input of type ALSA ( Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) -f alsa -i hw:1,0. Because it’s a webcam, which generally only has a single channel of audio (aka mono), it needs -ac 1 passed to it as it by defaults tries to interpret it as stereo (-ac 2). It you get the error cannot set channel count to 1 (Invalid argument) that means it probably actually does have stereo, so you can remove it or set it to -ac 2.
Finally, I am setting a custom sampling rate of 44.1kHz, -ar 44100, the same used on CDs. All that giving us the new input of -f alsa -ac 1 -ar 44100 -i hw:1,0 .
Next we do a custom mapping to make sure our output streams are set up as we expect. Now ffmpeg is usually pretty good about doing this by default if we have a single input with video, and a single input with audio, this is really just to make sure that nobody out there has weird issues. -map 0:0 -map 1:0 is saying that we want the first track from the first source 0:0 and the first track from the second source 1:0.
Finally our encoding for the audio is set up with -c:a aac -b:a 96k which is saying to use the AAC audio type, with a bitrate of 96k. Now this could be a lot higher, as the theoretical bitrate of this source is now 352k (sample rate X bit depth X channels), but I can’t tell the difference past 96k with my mic is why I stuck with that.
One gotcha with sound, is that if the ffmpeg encoding can’t keep up with the source, aka the fps output isn’t the same as the input, the audio will probably skip weirdly, so you may need to step it down to a lower framerate or resolution if it can’t keep up.
Adding timestamp
Optional, but is included in my service script
This is optional, but I find it handy to directly add the current timestamp to the stream. I also like to have the timestamp in a box so I can always read it in case the background is close to the same color as the font. Here is what we are going to add into the middle of our ffmpeg command.
It’s a lot text, but pretty self explanatory. We specify which font file to use drawtext=fontfile=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeSerif.ttf, that the text will be the local time (make sure you have set your locale right!). Next we are going to start the box 8 pixels in and 8 pixels down from the top left corner. Then we set the font’s color, and that it will have a box around it with a different color.
When running ffmpeg as a service, you probably don’t want to pollute the logs with standard output info. I also had a random issue with it trying to read info from stdin when a service, so I also added the -nostdin for my own sake. You can add these at the start of the command.
-nostdin -hide_banner -loglevel error
You can hide even more if you want to up it to -loglevel panic, but I personally want to see any errors that come up just in case.
Our new full command is a lot in one line, but it gets the job done!
Viewing the stream
When you have the stream running, you can pull up VLC or other network enabled media players and point to rtsp://raspberrypi:80/live/stream (if you changed your hostname, will have to do it based off ip).
When you have the command massaged exactly how you want it, we are going to create a systemd file with it, just like we did for the rstp server. In this case we will save it to the file /etc/systemd/system/encode_webcam.service and we will also add the argument -nostdin right after ffmpeg safety. sudo vi /etc/systemd/system/encode_webcam.service
I have looked at a few different security suits for my personal needs. They included iSpy (Windows) and ZoneMinder (Linux) but I finally decided upon the industry standard Blue Iris (Windows). I like it because of feature set: mobile app, motion detection, mobile alerts, NAS and Cloud storage, etc… Blue Iris also has a 15 day evaluation period to try before you buy. You don’t even need to register or provide credit info!
For our needs, the best part about Blue Iris is that it supports direct to disk recording. That way we don’t have to re-encode the stream! So lets get rolling, on the top left, select the first menu and hit “Add new camera”.
It will then have a popup to name and configure the camera, here make sure to select the last option “Direct to disk recording”.
Next it will need the network info for the camera, put in the same info as you did for VLC. Blue Iris should auto parse it into the fields it wants, and hit OK.
Volia! Your raspberry pi is now added to your security suite!
Now you can have fun setting up recording schedules, motion detection recording, mobile alerts, and more!
If you have been looking at cases for your shiny new Raspberry Pi 4, I am positive you have come across ones that either include heatsinks, a fan, or both. The question is, is that just a needless extra cost, or does it really help?
Well I ended up buying a case that came with both, and decided to test if it was worth running the fan or just keeping it off.
Methodology
Now as this was my own hardware, I wasn’t about to undo stress onto it. I decided to arbitrarily run the stress tests for two minutes each, which actually turned out to be pretty good to allow the core to heat up and even out.
I would then wait for the temperature to return to idle before attempting another run. This was all run in a 26.5*C room. I followed this guide to run the programs stress and cpuburn.
No Fan, No Heatsinks
Open air
Enclosed
idle
52
54
stress
78
82 FAIL
cpuburn
81 FAIL
So by itself, as long as the raspberry pi is in the open air, it seemed to just hang in there for the stress test before hitting the 80*C thermal limit. Which, when hit, the raspberry pi will automatically start throttling the speed of the processor to cool it.
No Fan, Heatsinks
Open air
Enclosed
idle
52
54
stress
75
81 FAIL
cpuburn
81 FAIL
We can see that the heatsink helped out minimally when in the open air, but it couldn’t keep up in an enclosed case without moving air.
Fan, No Heatsinks
Enclosed
idle
48
stress
64
cpuburn
70
Now that’s a difference! That tiny little fan really does do more than I expected it too.
Fan and Heatsinks
Enclosed
idle
44
stress
60
cpuburn
66
Well-well-well, looky there. Putting everything together really does make a difference.
Conclusion and Chart
Lets make this a little more digestible with a chart.
It’s pretty obvious that yes, both fans and heatsinks help. However, if you have to chose just one, pick the fan any day.
