Image Hub 👁

Helper hardware to rapidly share images from a digital camera

Image Hub is a computer that joins your Wifi and accepts your camera memory card. It ingests JPEG images, creates a gallery web-app, and serves the app over the local network. Image Hub provides image browsing and saving for publishing to Instagram stories, facebook or other social media.

The intended hardware is a Raspberry Pi 3 board, USB card reader, and USB power bank. A little OLED display is optional.

The display isn't covered here.

caveats

• tested with jpegs created by a digital camera, this is easy way to avoid any missing data from jpegs from the web that may have EXIF stripped out
• two sd card readers are supported on Raspberry Pi, but it's easier to run on mac and drag files into storage to add to the ETL/db

install

• npm install the node application
• create the /media directory structure the node apps expect
• create .env file

/media directory structure

this is the directory structure on the root of the pi filesystem

media
├── thumbs
├── small
├── storage
└── stories

.env example

place a file named .env in the project directory:

DISABLE_SERVER_RENDER=false
EXIFTOOL_PATH=/bin/exiftool
HOST=localhost
INITIAL_STATIC_SERVER=false
MEDIA_PATH=/media
PORT=3000
SQLITE_USE_WAL_MODE=true
SQLITE_WAL_CHECK_INTERVAL_SECONDS=10

run locally

• npm run etl in one terminal
• drag/drop a filename.JPG with exif data (an exif preview thumbnail is necessary, camera pictures work well for this) into the storage directory
• use npm run db:images orr sqlite3 CLI (sqlite3 cam.db) to check the image table has data
• npm run server in another terminal
• load up localhost:3000/all (all ignores image create dates) to see the server loads

server.js feature flags

SEVER_RENDER_OFF=true

turn off server rendering for debugging

INITIAL_STATIC_SERVER=true

turn on a front-controller-style static file server for the media directroy (for emulating nginx sitting in front of the express app)

remote logging

• ./live-logs.sh hub1sshhost for node app access logs in journal
• ./pull-nginx-journal-report.sh hub1sshhost get and view nginx server report for hub1sshhost
• ./pull-express-journal-report.sh hub1sshhost get and view express server report for hub1sshhost
• ./pull-nginx-access-report.sh someotherhost get and view nginx access.log server report for someotherhost

hardware setup

• get a raspberry pi 3 with a large enough SD card to keep lots of JPEGS on (32gb+)
• install Raspbian Stretch lite or Stretch and expand the filesystem, set locales etc.
• set up the raspi with ssh key access i.e. $ ssh mypi lets you run commands via ssh
• connect some Raspberry Pis with ssh access via their ssh host name on your network
• get a UGREEN 20250 or Transcend TS-RDF5K card reader to use with the pi

deploy setup

• connect prepared Raspberry Pis to the network
• install Ansible 2.4+ via homebrew
• create create ansible config file for deploys
• create create ansible inventory file for deploys
• create wpa_supplicant.conf
• put ~/.ssh/raspi-deploy key in place that works to get this repository from github
• npm run deploy

ansible.cfg example

located in project directory

[defaults]
inventory=inventory.ini

inventory.ini example

located in project directory this has the channel and psk variables set for specified hosts

[hubs]
hub1sshhost
hub2sshhostwithdisplay

[display-hubs]
hub2sshhostwithdisplay

[ap-hubs]
hub1sshhost channel=7
hub2sshhostwithdisplay channel=6

[ap-hubs:vars]
psk=mywifipassword
cert_domain=mydomain.com
cert_path=/etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.com

wpa_supplicant.conf example

located in this_project_directory/roles/wifi/files/wpa_supplicant.conf

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
network={
	ssid="My iPhone Hotspot"
	key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
	psk=wpa_passphrase_result0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
	priority=100
}
network={
	ssid="my-home-network"
	psk=wpa_passphrase_result0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
	key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
	priority=99
}