Bike-Cam

A quick helper utility that I ran as a cron job on my local Raspberry Pi Zero W.

What?

This is essentially a wrapper for the raspistill application on a Raspberry Pi. Executing the script will trigger a photo from a USB web camera. The resulting image is then copied to Google Cloud Storage (GCS). The latest image in GCS is then served on a React front-end on a GCP Compute Engine instance.

Example Usage:

python capture.py \
        --dt $(date -I) \
        --hour $(date "+%H") \
        --min $(date "+%M")

Why?

Necessity is the mother of invention

I had moved to a new apartment with less space and had to start to store my commuter bike outside.

This was part of a larger project utilizing Google Cloud's Vision API.

tl;dr

1. Take a photo with the webcam.
2. Push to GCS.
3. Bucket Triggers a Cloud Function to detect objects in the image (specifically the presence of a bike).
4. If bike is not in image send alert via GCP's Cloud Monitoring.