Stream AllSky LIVE to Apple Homekit (Apple Watch, iPhone...)

[frankhirsch]

Hi,
Just wanted to share how I finally succeeded in streaming my current AllSky image to my Apple Watch... While it is certainly pretty useless to use this on a browser capable device, I still wanted to have this on my wrist to check anytime without leaving other apps (such as maybe ASIAIR...).

The trick ist to use Homebridge and install the Homebridge Camera FFmpeg plugin. Once up and running it's pretty easy to configure the Allsky camera by adding the following configuration to point to the location of your current image from Allsky (which is /home/pi/allsky/tmp/image.jpg by default).

Sample JSON configuration
{ "name": "Allsky", "videoConfig": { "source": "-loop 1 -i /mnt/ds/images/tmp/image.jpg", "stillImageSource": "-i /mnt/ds/images/tmp/image.jpg", "debug": true } }

Hope you like it!

CS, Frank

[EricClaeys]

Very clever!

[OllicMcFly]

It dont work for me

here my log:

[6/2/2024, 2:01:32 PM] Loaded 1 cached accessories from cachedAccessories.0E4496CE5BD5.
[6/2/2024, 2:01:32 PM] [Camera FFmpeg] [Allsky] Configuring cached bridged accessory...
[6/2/2024, 2:01:32 PM] Homebridge v1.8.2 (HAP v0.12.1) (Camera FFmpeg) is running on port 43339.
[6/2/2024, 2:01:56 PM] [Camera FFmpeg] [Allsky] Snapshot requested: 1280 x 720
[6/2/2024, 2:01:56 PM] [Camera FFmpeg] [Allsky] Snapshot command: ffmpeg -i /home/ollic/Allsky/image.jpg -frames:v 1 -f image2 - -hide_banner -loglevel error
[6/2/2024, 2:01:56 PM] [Camera FFmpeg] [Allsky] [Snapshot] /home/ollic/Allsky/image.jpg: No such file or directory
[6/2/2024, 2:01:56 PM] [Camera FFmpeg] [Allsky] Fetching snapshot took 0.016 seconds.
[6/2/2024, 2:01:56 PM] [Camera FFmpeg] [Allsky] Failed to fetch snapshot.
[Allsky] Snapshot request handler provided empty image buffer!

[OllicMcFly]

The file exists.

ollic@raspidocker:~ $ stat /home/ollic/Allsky/image.jpg
File: /home/ollic/Allsky/image.jpg
Size: 1615796
Blocks: 3160
IO Block: 4096
regular file
Device: 179,2
Inode: 426346
Links: 1
Access: (0644/-г-r--г--) Uid: ( 1000/
ollic)
Gid: ( 1000/ ollic)
Access: 2024-06-02 16:32:54.000000000 +0200
Modify: 2024-06-02 16:32:54.000000000 +0200
Change: 2024-06-02 16:32:55.944052946 +0200
Birth: 2024-06-02 16:32:55.624054939 +0200

okay what ive to do for the permission?

[OllicMcFly]

Maybe i have to say i run ffmpeg over hombridge via docker compose ?!

[frankhirsch]

It seems to be world readable - that should be fine! Are you sure your „dockerized“ Homebridge process does see the same path?

[OllicMcFly]

Do u mean the ffmpeg Plugin ?

name": "Camera FFmpeg", "cameras": [ { "name": "Allsky", "unbridge": false, "videoConfig": { "source": "-loop 1 -i /home/ollicAllsky/image.jpg", "stillImageSource": "-i /home/ollic/Allsky/image.jpg", "debug": true } } ], "_bridge": { "username": "0E:44:96:CE:5B:D5", "port": 43339 }, "platform": "Camera-ffmpeg"}

The homebridge docker compose is at /home/ollic/homebridge installed

[OllicMcFly]

[frankhirsch]

I am not a docker expert, but most probably you will need to provide a path to the image to the docker image… Homebridge running in docker does not automatically see all the directories?!

[OllicMcFly]

Okay ive installed homebridge without docker and know this log show up

[EricClaeys]

ENOENT means "No such directory entry". My first guess would be that it can't find the "ffmpeg" command.

[frankhirsch]

I agree… ☝️

[OllicMcFly]

I dont know.. homebridge and ffmpeg plugin are installed.
I give up

[Jsorace04]

going to keep trying some things but posting incase anyone else runs into this. I am receiving a null when i try to access my camera. wondering if i have the correct directory. I used the default (/home/pi/allsky/tmp/image.jpg) @frankhirsch thoughts?

[Camera FFmpeg] [Allsky] FFmpeg exited with code: 1 and signal: null (Error)

[frankhirsch]

try su - homebrige (the "+" is indicating the value has been truncated...)

[Jsorace04]

root@allsky:# su - homebridge
This account is currently not available.
root@allsky:#

[frankhirsch]

I just tried with a different (not the default pi account) user if the file is readable for others.

xyz@allsky:~ $ ls -al /home/pi/allsky/tmp/image.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 allsky allsky 1521812 23. Sep 18:12 /home/pi/allsky/tmp/image.jpg

It seems the image should be world readable by default!
Can you please check the permission in your system?

[Jsorace04]

i just checked and it is -rw-rw-rw- 1 pi pi 232289 Sep 23 12:12 /home/pi/allsky/tmp/image.jpg

i tried to change all users to have read write but that didnt seem to work.

i have a feeling its something with homebridge not having some sort of permissions

[frankhirsch]

Potentially @Alex-developer or @EricClaeys can help in that case. I think the Allsky "tmp" directory is a tmpfs volume mounted with specific user rights?

[frankhirsch]

Maybe there is also another issue...
Homebridge currently get's an error when the "image.jpg" is read directly from "/home/pi/allsky/tmp/image.jpg" - probably because the image is deleted insted of overwritten. Therefore the stream is getting broken :-/

I will try to make a local installation on my Allsky to evaluate and let you know. I think currently it is not possible to run it this way.

[Jsorace04]

@frankhirsch let me know. i appreciate all the help today.

[frankhirsch]

Not sure what exactly you did, but potentially a reboot wil fix that since the tmpfs only exists in memory (not on the disk).

[Jsorace04]

can you just run ls -al /home/pi/allsky and tell me what permissions the 'tmp' folder is set to?

i currently see it as dr--r--r--

[frankhirsch]

Sorry, currently not at home…
In question make it 775 for moment

[Jsorace04]

yes so current structure should not be 444. 775 has it back to working order.

this is how i learn. Thanks.

now to research more on Linux directory permissions and how they work LOL

[EricClaeys]

Don't change permissions on anything in ~/allsky. It may cause problems with Allsky.
In order to update tmp/image.jpg, a process need to be able to add and delete files in tmp, so run ls -ld ~/allsky/tmp. It should be 755 or 775 (drwxrwxr--).

[Jsorace04]

@EricClaeys so i changed the user and group to pi and not homebridge. I am not sure if this is what changes homebridge to run under pi

pi@allsky:~ $ ls -ld / /home /home/pi /home/pi/allsky /home/pi/allsky/tmp /home/pi/allsky/tmp/image.jpg /home/homebridge
drwxr-xr-x 18 root root 4096 Jul 3 20:14 /
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Sep 23 10:09 /home
drwxr-xr-x 3 pi pi 4096 Sep 23 10:15 /home/homebridge
drwx------ 5 pi pi 4096 Sep 3 16:50 /home/pi
drwxr-xr-x 16 pi pi 4096 Sep 3 19:57 /home/pi/allsky
drwxrwxr-x 5 pi www-data 200 Sep 25 21:49 /home/pi/allsky/tmp
-rw-r--r-- 1 pi pi 582678 Sep 25 21:49 /home/pi/allsky/tmp/image.jpg
pi@allsky:~ $

I also see that the ‘tmp’ folder has its own group. Is that true or should it be pi.

[EricClaeys]

Only the "pi" login can see things in /home/pi.
As I mentioned before, run chmod 755 /home/pi.

The web server runs as the "www-data" user and group, and it needs to be able to write to /home/pi/allsky/tmp, which is why that directory is grouped to "www-data" and mode 775.

[frankhirsch]

@EricClaeys He could simply add the user „homekit“ to the group „www-data“…?

[Jsorace04]

Chmod 755 /home/pi worked. However we are still not out of the water.

@frankhirsch it will spin and spin until i get this last debug message

[26/09/2024, 06:27:02] [Camera FFmpeg] [Allsky] FFmpeg exited with code: 0 and signal: null (Expected)

[frankhirsch]

@Jsorace04 this indeed seems to be the issue @EricClaeys identified earlier (see comment below)

1. ffmpeg will be running in a loop asap a client will access the video stream
2. if your allsky camera does take a picture, the image.jpg will be replaced (first delete, the create)
3. the ffmpeg process will crash as soon it tries to read the image.jpg and it's not there anymore

I will need to check if I can find my old provite allsky module (static file copy) I once wrote - or if we can change the allsky skript from "delete" to "overwrite". Hopefully this may fix the ffmpeg crash...

[EricClaeys]

@frankhirsch, you are correct that when a new image.jpg is saved, the old one is deleted and the new one created. The file itself is never updated.

[frankhirsch]

Any chance you give me a hint where ~/tmp/image.jpg is finally „rewritten“? Maybe it will be easy to change to „update“…

[EricClaeys]

People tend to say "the file was updated", which technically is incorrect. In most cases that doesn't matter though.
What actually happens when after an image is taken is the prior ~/allsky/tmp/image.jpg is deleted, then a new one is created and written to. This means there is a very small window (less than 1 second) where the image.jpg file doesn't exist.
If Allsky instead overwrote the file, there would be a small window where the file would be 0 bytes long or only partially written to.

What do you mean by "where"? Where on the Pi is the image stored, or where in the code is the image created? The allsky/scripts/saveImage.sh script does all that work.
What do you want to change to "update" ?

If you are saving images, a copy of ~/allsky/image.jpg is written to ~/allsky/images/YYYYMMDD/image-YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.jpg.

[frankhirsch]

@EricClaeys Ok, I will check and potentially create an issue if I can see problems while running ffmpeg transcoding. So far it seems to work well with the current defaults if running homebridge locally on the Allsky RPi using the default image.jpg! I switched my own setup to this scenario to verify...

[Jsorace04]

@frankhirsch this is what we call "FM". It's currently working. After I made the change at the /home folder to 755 it's working.