I’ve bought the octocam with motionOS and it’s working well. Just wondered if there’s a way to view the camera stream when out?? I understand how to view it through my IP address but can it be accessed when I’m not home?? (Amateur pi builder)
The problem here doesn’t lie with your Pi skills. :)
You need something called “port forwarding” in order to allow access to your device through your router’s firewall. Don’t worry, it’s not too complicated depending on your router model.
!DANGER!
Firstly, a word of caution: port forwarding opens up that port on your router to the world-wide-web, potentially allowing access to your device to anybody who wishes to connect. Always make sure that SSH is disabled on your Pi (it is by default) and that you don’t have the default password (raspberry) on your Pi!
Now that’s out of the way, the rest is quite simple!
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Log onto your router by connecting to it through a browser via it’s IP address, usually something like “192.168.1.254”. This can often be found on a sticker on your router.
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Have a look at your router’s settings. Firstly, take note of your Pi’s IP Address if you can see it. If not, enter “ifconfig” into your Octocam’s terminal to get the IPV4 address.
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Now have a look for a setting for “Port Forwarding”, it’s probably under something like “Advanced Settings”. If you’re using a BT Home Hub like I am, it’s under Advanced Settings - Firewall.
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Now you need to set up the port you wish to use. For me, this is located under “Add new Game or Application”. From here you can set a port between 1-65535, known as “unprivileged ports”, although these may be different depending on your make of router.
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Now assign your device (usually listed as just raspberry pi) to the new application you just made, an whallah!
Hopefully, you now have a working port forward for your Pi!
I’m unsure myself as to how you actually access the Octocam’s video feed, so you may require a web GUI if it hasn’t got one already.
Hope this helped, and forgive any spelling mistakes; it took a while to type! :D
Nice thanks!!! May give it a miss then. Especially since it saves files anyway
any ideas if or how the cam activates with Infrared? i thought it would be able to set it to be in night mode. i may have misread or got wrong impression though.
I’m afraid that Octocam doesn’t work with infra-red night vision out-of-the-box.
The camera included in the Pimoroni kit is the standard Raspberry Pi camera module, not the NoIR version.
If you’re willing to get you hands dirtied, you could modify the Octocam a little to incorporate an NoIR camera with some IR LEDs instead, which would give a working, if a little crude, night vision camera.
The NoIR camera is here: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-camera-module-v2-1-with-mount, and you’ll want some infra-red LEDs as well: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/led-infrared.
If you’re looking for a more usable night vision camera for the Raspberry Pi, I’d recommend building your own camera rather than using the Octocam kit, since you’ll soon find things like glare and lack of lighting to be an issue. Still might be a fun project though!