What my Rock64 4G is doing (w/ setup guide).

[rmbusy]

I purchased the Rock64 4G for a single purpose: To monitor cheap IP based network cameras bought off eBay, running a program called Motion 4.0.1.

I attached a external self powered USB 3.0 8TB hard drive, and currently monitor 5 cameras via the GB Ethernet interface.  The camera configurations are 3x 1080P 2MP cameras, and 2x 720P 1MP cameras. 

Great write up!  Would you mind please telling us which cameras you ended up using?  I'm interested in setting up something similar.

Thanks!  Sorry for the delay, but although I checked the "Subscribe to this thread" button when I created it, it didn't subscribe me to it, and didn't send me email when someone replied.  I've been busy, and haven't checked back here for quite awhile.

The cameras I'm using were the cheapest I found on eBay at the time.  All of the cameras are IP based network cameras.  I bought 5 1080P 2MP H.View cameras w/ IR night vision.  These turned out to be really nice cameras, and I wish I had bought more at the time.  I also bought a pile of 720P 1MP cameras, of 2 different types.  Of these, the first ones were usable out of the box, but the FW on them limits configurability to I.E., with a plug in downloaded from the camera.  This seemed like a great way to get a Chinese hacker virus, so I would only use it in a disposable Virtual Machine.  The second batch had such bad FW, they were basically unusable out of the box.  I made a project out of them, to replace the crappy FW with something usable.

If you're shopping for cheap IP cameras, finding ones that allow configuration from *any* web browser is desirable.  However, most of the sellers in the lower price ranges really don't know anything about what they're selling.  Also, with the cameras I bought, I found the microprocessor they used was different.  The H.View cameras use a HiSilicon micro, which has full documentation available, including a SDK.  These micros run cool to the touch.  The other cameras all use a Goke 7102 micro.  This chip runs very hot, even when doing nothing.  I'm concerned about it's long term reliability.  Also, they are completely closed off as far as documentation.  There is a rumor they sell their SDK for $10K, and I could find no datasheet or other information about it.  Given all that, if you have a choice, go for a camera with a HiSilicon processor.

The nice thing about the H.View camera is their FW is relatively clean.  After a little digging through the FW on the camera, I found the 1080P stream URL, the 720P stream URL, and a snapshot URL.  When dealing with cheap eBay cameras, those addresses are typically not known.  Having the snapshot URL is the most important for setting it up with Motion, because even the Rock64 can't handle decoding live streams for more than a few low resolution cameras, without dropping frames (at least in the current configuration).  I still haven't found a snapshot URL for the 720P cameras, so I'm monitoring them in 640x360 mode.  The Pi2 couldn't keep up with the decoding of 2 cameras in this mode, which is why I moved up to the Rock64 (that and the faster disk / network interfaces).

I clicked the "Subscribe" button again, so hopefully I'll start getting messages when someone posts to the thread now.

One other warning about IP cameras : Be sure to firewall them off from the internet, else you'll be contributing to the population of Minions out there.  All of these cameras have so many embedded IP addresses, URLs, and open ports, it's downright scary.  So far, they all run embedded Linux, w/ Busybox.  All of them I have looked at have open telnet ports, and the last batch I bought had no root password!  You could log into one of these cameras by telnetting to it, type "root", and a carriage return for the password.  I set up static IP addresses for all my cameras in a fixed range, then on my AP, blocked all internet access for all ports for the range.  The last batch of cameras spend all of their time trying to look up a IP address from a URL, so they can "phone home".  These addresses are all in China or Hong Kong.

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Hi,

I think that from 0.5.9 forward that Ayufun's image automatically expand the root filesystem on first boot and so those steps are not needed.  Check it out on the change log on the page below.

https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-build/releases

JL

Thanks for the tip!  I added a note to that affect in the procedure.  Since I hadn't looked at anything that new yet, I wasn't aware it was being done automatically.