Category: Computers

I bought a Raspberry Pi model B revision 2.0 nine years ago and I’ve been using it with various cameras as a webcam server pointed out my window in places that I’ve lived. (The window where I have the camera now gets direct sun on sunny days, causing a lot of lens flare.)

A couple of weeks ago, I found a Raspberry Pi Zero W 2 in stock at Chicago Electronic Distributors, so I decided to switch my webcam from the Pi Model B to a Pi Zero 2 W. In the last iteration of my webcam, I was using Motion with the Raspberry Pi HQ Camera and the 6mm wide angle lens. With the Pi Zero, you also need the Pi Zero Camera Cable because of the smaller the CSI-2 camera connector.

On my Pi Model B, Motion had been crashing frequently with the errors, “unexpected camera control callback event, 0x4f525245” and “motion_watchdog: Thread 1 – Watchdog timeout Trying to do a graceful restart.” I was never able to sort out the problem after spending more time on it (here and here) than I wanted.

With the new Raspberry Pi Zero W 2, I had initially tried installing the just released Raspberry Pi OS, Bullseye, but I saw that other people were having some problems with Motion and Bullseye, so I installed Buster 10.11 instead.

I used the Raspberry Pi Imager app to setup the micro SD card. One thing that I had forgotten with the imager app was that using Ctrl-Shift-x will bring up an Advanced options dialog box where you can set the hostname, enable SSH, configure WiFi and locale settings. This makes it easier to do a headless setup. After I found the Pi Zero’s IP address on my network (by looking at the client list on my Asus router) I gave it a static IP address then used these great Circuit Basics instructions to setup Motion.

I also installed Apache Web server using the command:

sudo apt install apache2 -y

With the Pi Model B, I had the webcam’s address on a subdomain of my site. I used Dynamic DNS (on Google Domains, my registrar) to redirect to the IP address that my Pi was running on. Because I wanted to enable HTTPS on the camera URL, I got a certificate from Let’s Encrypt, so the URL, pizero.lesliewong.us:8081, was able to use the HTTPS protocol. IIRC, on the Model B, I was able to edit /etc/motion/motion.conf and add the lines:

stream_tls on
webcontrol_tls on
webcontrol_key /path to…/privekey.pem
webcontrol_cert /path to…/fullchain.pem

to enable HTTPS streaming. When I did that on my new setup, it didn’t work because the version of Motion that I installed wasn’t compiled with SSL/TLS support, which I found when I ran the command:

sudo systemctl status motion

After spending a lot of time trying to get that to work and failing using stream_tls, I found a way using the Apache Module mod_proxy:

sudo a2enmod proxy
sudo a2enmod proxy_http

I also added two lines to the file /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default-le-ssl.conf (where /webcam is the URL on the domain, e.g., domain.com/webcam):

ProxyPass /webcam http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8081/
ProxyPassReverse /webcam http:// xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8081/

I was sort of surprised when it worked.