The camera module connects directly to the GPIO interface and has the ability to capture video directly in h264 and mpeg-4 formats. It has 512Mb of RAM, one USB port, and integrated WiFi. The Pi Zero is more than capable for such a small computer. To assemble the camera I got a Raspberry Pi Zero W with NOOBS, a Raspberry Pi HD Camera, a mounting plate, and a tripod. There’s some obvious motion towards the end of the clip. But, before we dive into it, see it in action in this short clip. I’ll give you an insight into the high-level design, implementation, deploying to Cloud Run, and caveats to keep in mind. Along the way, I was inspired by the Nest Home service where you can see the live video feed from your security cameras and I thought, could I build something like that instead? At least, a proof-of-concept with the most basic functionality. The intial goal was to program it to be a USB camera that I could plug in to any computer and OS and use it with video conferencing software, mainly Google Meet.

Thankfully, I was finally able to put it in action and show you a working version. Turns out that my spare personal time is quite scarce nowadays for a hobby project like this and the pandemic is almost over. Being an engineer I did the logical thing to do: I built my own. Some time during of the pandemic in 2020, I wanted to get a better webcam to improve the quality of my video conferencing in the remote-everything era. Let me show you how I put together a simple system to capture, encode, and stream. And, I also wrote a simple web service to live stream a video feed directly from my Raspberry Pi to any HLS video player out there using Google Cloud Run. I built my own HD camera with Rasbperry Pi just for fun.

Raspibian built in ffmpeg h264