Dash cams have become very popular in the last few years. They even captured a giant meteor in Russia a few years ago. Seriously, a meteor!
Why are they so popular? They are both useful and pretty simple. So simple, in fact, you can build your very own using JavaScript, a Raspberry Pi and some UI code, hooked together with PubNub. That’s it! Here are two tutorials by Sunny Gleason that show you how to do just that.
Part 1: Assembling the hardware
In part one, you’ll put together a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and the standard 8 Mpix camera module along with a tiny wifi adapter. Sunny shows you how to set up the operating system, configure the camera, and connect to your PubNub account. Finally you’ll build a small Node script to capture periodic images and send them to PubNub with some clever chunking.
Part 2: Dash Cam Viewer
In part two you’ll build an Angular JS based UI to view the live images on your phone, streamed through the PubNub channel of your choice, and using Bootstrap for a nice clean look.
As this series proves, the Raspberry Pi is an amazingly flexible and versatile device. Starting with Sunny’s project you could easily add a license plate reader, automatically tweet interesting shots, or even do face detection.