VIDEO
Set your Pi for mobile streaming video
Sean Conway helps you ride the rails with a Raspberry Pi and its camera, with a bit of streaming video trickery thrown in for good measure.
OUR EXPERT
Sean Conway is a former IT security specialist from a national telecoms company who implements Pi-based train projects to get his much-needed technology fix, now that he’s retired.
Incorporating single-board computers into a hobby such as model railways is a great way for a maker to double their pleasure by combining their passions. In this tutorial, we’re going to develop a Raspberry Pi camera system to produce a video from a moving HO scale model train.
The tutorial will introduce the latest Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W(PZ2W) and provide the configuration details required to stream video from the camera-fitted Pi. We’ll also touch on the model rail cars.
The PZ2W is ideal for this project. Its small physical size fits nicely in the limited space of an HO-scale model rail car. The quad-core processor packs enough processing power to support streaming content. All aboard? Then let’s get started.
First stop: OS
We’re assuming that the reader knows how to install a Raspberry Pi OS using the Raspberry Pi Imager software.
Users download the Pi OS image and after unzipping the file, use Raspberry Pi Imager to install the OS image to the microSD card. A video and support documentation for the process is available on the Raspberry Pi OS website.