Motion Detection with RaspiCam, Non-Module version

[lolobyte]

@bhepler

have u increase the swapfile?

[bhepler]

@lolobyte Negative, I have not. What would you recommend?

[lolobyte]

@bhepler
in general it’s not bad for a raspi3 to increase the swapfile from 100MB to a higher level.

at first check your status:
sudo service dphys-swapfile status
U see something like this:

● dphys-swapfile.service - LSB: Autogenerate and use a swap file
Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/dphys-swapfile)
Active: active (exited) since Mi 2016-11-30 13:17:14 CET; 6h ago
Process: 613 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/dphys-swapfile start (code=exited, status=0 /SUCCESS)

Nov 30 13:17:13 raspi3 systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Autogenerate and use a swa…
Nov 30 13:17:14 raspi3 dphys-swapfile[613]: Starting dphys-swapfile swapfile…
Nov 30 13:17:14 raspi3 dphys-swapfile[613]: want /var/swap=1024MByte, checki…t
Nov 30 13:17:14 raspi3 dphys-swapfile[613]: done.
Nov 30 13:17:14 raspi3 systemd[1]: Started LSB: Autogenerate and use a swap…e.
Hint: Some lines were ellipsized, use -l to show in full.

Maybe u have 100MB instead of 1024 like in my case.

If u want to change this value the edit your

sudo nano /etc/dphys-swapfile

change to this value and save your file

CONF_SWAPSIZE=1024

the do a

sudo dphys-swapfile setup

and activate your new swap level:

sudo dphys-swapfile swapon

thats all. Now your System can handle wit more than his physical RAM.

In My case i do in raspi-config a new

“Expand File system”

to reorganize the file system an reboot after that my raspi.
If you are a owner of a raspi 2 it’s more common to change the swap file to max 512MB.

please inform me what’s your experience after this change

you can also check very niche your tasks mem, swap and other things in a ssh session on your PC with htop

sudo apt-get install htop

have a nice try

[Binog]

@lolobyte
Can U specify what this command does,. Am not sure if it isn’t doubling the motion command:

@reboot sleep 150; screen -S motion -dmS sudo motion
(ignored the -c path part, cause renamed the config to motion.conf, so not needed)

why is there two time motion - in it?

By the way it isn’t working on my mirror

[Kimzer]

I am completely unable to make this work.
The camera wont take any snapshots, maybe just a config error. But can someone confirm that this still works or show me something that works? Dont wanna go out and buy a pir sensor if i can make use of the raspicam. :)

[bhepler]

@Kimzer - If the camera won’t even take a snapshot, then none of this is going to work. Have you tried the various tutorials about getting the PiCam to work? The ones that are at the basic level of “I enter this command and it takes a picture right then and there and I can download it”?

Start with the official Getting Started Guide. Once you can get images from the camera to your Pi, come back.

If you can get the camera to produce images but have trouble getting Motion to work, follow my tutorial and the part where it says “at this point you can test it but…”, stop there. Change the parameter in the motion.conf file named output_pictures to on and change on_event_start to echo Motion Detected!. That should put a bunch of snapshots on your memory card. Test Motion by entering ./motion -c motion.conf and you should see motion writing messages to the screen.

[Kimzer]

Ah my bad, poorly formulated on my end here.

I am able to take snapshots, and i have gotten the camera to work just fine itself. It is the motion part i am struggling with.

But i will have to test some more.

[Freebond]

This post is deleted!

[Natacha3]

@bhepler It works perfectly !
Thank you so much for sharing !

[stangarrang]

@bhepler I was hoping you could give me a hand. I’ve got your motion working but. Pm2 is not auto starting the motion. Everything is working fine if I manually “pm2 start motion” and " pm2 start mm" and I’ve tried adding @pm2 start motion to my auto start along side my “pm2 start mm” but that only breaks both processes. I’m trying to get both the magic mirror and the motion to auto start upon reboot.