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GoProController

An http API to control multiple GoPro cameras over wifi.

Description

This program can be used to control multiple GoPro cameras via the goprohero Python library. When ran from a Linux machine with compatible wireless card, this program is capable of automatically negotiating between the different ad-hoc wireless networks that each cameras makes.

A user interface is available for this API as a standalone package. See GoProControllerUI.

How it works

The backbone of GoProApp is a program called GoProProxy that runs asynchronously to the server. This proxy periodically grabs the status of every camera in the database and sends commands to cameras when appropriate. The proxy uses wifi to jump between networks and goprohero to handle the communication to the cameras. A Django app is used to persist data from the proxy and serve API endpoints.

Note: The xml version of the above diagram can be modified with https://www.draw.io/.

Production Setup (Ubuntu)

First, download the code:

git clone https://github.com/joshvillbrandt/GoProController.git ~/GoProController
sudo ln -s ~/GoProController /home/GoProController

If you are running Ubuntu, use the setup.sh script to automatically set up the application in a production mode:

sudo /home/GoProController/setup.sh

Upon completion of setup.sh, you should now be able to navigate to http://localhost/ and see the API. In addition, the GoProApp/proxy.py file is also now running continuously to the local wifi adapter and communicate with the cameras.

You can interact with the server and proxy using service and initctl:

sudo service apache2 status
sudo initctl status gopro-proxy

Logs for both are also available:

tail /var/log/apache2/error.log
tail -f /var/log/gopro-proxy.log

To set a specific interface for wifi control, add the following to upstart.conf:

env GOPRO_WIFI_INTERFACE=wlan1

Development Setup (Ubuntu, Mac)

To run GoProApp without Apache and Upstart, launch the site with the Django development server:

git clone https://github.com/joshvillbrandt/GoProController.git ~/GoProController
cd ~/GoProController
sudo python setup.py install
python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

In another terminal window, launch the proxy to communicate with the cameras:

sudo python ~/GoProController/proxy.py # sudo needed for logging (or add yourself to syslog in Ubuntu)

You should now be able to navigate to http://localhost:8000/ and see the API.

To set a specific interface for wifi control, add the following environment variable before the proxy command:

sudo GOPRO_WIFI_INTERFACE='wlan1' python ~/GoProController/proxy.py

API

This API provides the following endpoints:

The API if build on the Django REST Framework. Please reference their documentation for detailed querying information.

Change History

This project uses semantic versioning.

v0.2.4 - 2015/01/29

• Added GOPRO_SNAPSHOTS environment flag to turn off grabbing snapshots images if desired
• The proxy now fails commands when it can't find the camera instead of leaving them in the queue to block everybody else
• Added spammer.py - try sudo goprospammer -p record -v on
• Added logger.py - try goprologger -d output

v0.2.3 - 2015/01/14

• Updated goprohero and wireless library versions

v0.2.2 - 2015/01/06

• Pagination is now supported; try ?page=1&limit=20
• Basic sorting/ordering is now supported; try ?ordering=-date_added
• Fixed a schema bug that prevented commands without values from being saved (commands like delete_all and delete_last)

v0.2.1 - 2014/12/03

• Updated for library change from gopro to goprohero
• Fixed bugs in setup.sh
• Moved API root to /api when using the Apache config
• Added the /api/config endpoint
• Added support to serve GoProControllerUI static content at /

v0.2.0 - 2014/11/24

• Renamed project from GoProApp to GoProController
• Refactored user interface out of the project and into GoProControllerUI
• Now contains a RESTful API for cameras and commands

v0.1.1 - 2014/09/11

• Bug fixes

v0.1.0 - 2013/10/31

• Initial release

Known Issues

There is a memory leak that will cause the program to crash after a couple hours of use with two or more cameras. (It will crash quicker with just one camera since the program runs quicker without network hops.) I've spent a few hours trying to track down the issue to no avail. It seems as though there are uncollectable objects from both the Django side and the GoPro/urllib2 side. I tried replacing urllib2 with python-requests/urllib3, but that didn't help. I used gc and objgraph to help debug.

Contributions

Pull requests to the develop branch are welcomed!