Technical hurdles

When I started working on the code for the camera, I was genuinely surprised at the lack of easy tutorials to get the software up and running.  The only truly straightforward and easy part was installing the operating system onto the Raspberry Pi.  After that, you’re in your own world.  I would try software only to have it do about half of what I needed it to do; the best parts were when there was a blog post that looked like a promising step in the right direction, only to not be able to get the files that were necessary to take that step.  While i ended up getting the webcam to record just fine using FFMPEG, writing a python script and having it load on startup was a nightmare that has not ended yet.  Also, with FFMPEG, you have to press ‘q’ in order to stop the recording, but there is no software that can create a virtual keystroke of the letter ‘q’ for the program to recognize.  This relegated us to a demo that in real life would be a one hit wonder until someone recovered the camera, plugged in a keyboard, and hit ‘q’ to stop the recording.  That is not a friendly user experience.

The two hurdles remaining are simulating that keystroke and changing the python script to run on startup.  The second part I know how to do, but I do not want to test it since I would get up to the start of recording and then have to cut power to the Raspberry Pi in order to stop the recording.  The last thing that would have to work is that the simulation of the keystroke would have to register when a user is not logged in.