Stream Video & Control Your Robot via Your Web Browser

Here are some pictures of what you will end up with. This project has been built upon the Dexter Industries GoPiGo robot.
Dexter Industries offers a modular robot with excellent video, printed tutorials to getting you up and running in a few hours.
The initial Dexter Industries robots were based on the Rapsberry Pi 2 (which is what my robot is based upon) but have now upgraded their robot package to support the Raspberry Pi 3.
You can read more about this robot and pick your up from Dexter Industries
A lot of the code and functions included here are leveraged from Dexter Industries examples which are licensed under GPL.

To start we need to clone the python project repository which will give us access to the code we need.
We can then work on resolving a bunch of depedencies and install some software. So let's get going.

 bash# git clone https://github.com/tangowhisky37/RaspiPythonProjects.git

Change into the folder containing the code for the browser controller GoPiGo robot.

 bash# cd Gopigo_Robot_Browser_Controlled

Let's get started with the installation. But before we do that we need to make the browser_stream_setup.sh script executable

 bash# chmod +x ./browser_stream_setup.sh

 bash# sudo ./browser_stream_setup.sh

During the installation you will see errors about mjpg-streamer. Don't stress we will manually install them next.
Once the installer has done it's job open up a console and download the fork of mjpg-streamer for the Raspberry Pi from github.

 bash# git clone https://github.com/jacksonliam/mjpg-streamer

The above project is a fork of http://sourceforge.net/projects/mjpg-streamer/ with added support for the Raspberry Pi camera via the input_raspicam plugin.
mjpg-streamer is a command line application that copies JPEG frames from one or more input plugins to multiple output plugins.
It can be used to stream JPEG files over an IP-based network from a webcam to various types of viewers such as Chrome, Firefox, Cambozola, VLC, mplayer, and other software capable of receiving MJPG streams.
It was originally written for embedded devices with very limited resources in terms of RAM and CPU.
Its predecessor "uvc_streamer" was created because Linux-UVC compatible cameras directly produce JPEG-data, allowing fast and perfomant M-JPEG streams even from an embedded device running OpenWRT.
The input module "input_uvc.so" captures such JPG frames from a connected webcam. mjpg-streamer now supports a variety of different input devices.
You must have cmake installed. You will also probably want to have a development version of libjpeg installed. We used libjpeg8-dev based on guidance from the developers. e.g.
So let's proceed, install the dependencies for mjpg-streamer and then compile, build and install mjpg-streamer from source.

 bash# sudo apt-get install cmake libjpeg8-dev

 bash# cd mjpg-streamer-experimental
 bash# make
 bash# sudo make install

With all the installation now out of the way you are now able to proceed with launch of the streaming, browser control program.
Make robot_web_server.py executable

 bash# chmod +x robot_web_server.py

Run robot_web_server.py which launches the Python Tornado web server
Open a web browser on any computer or mobile device and enter the following in the address bar:

 http://IP_Address_Of_Your_Raspberry_Pi:98

The page that hosts the streaming video and browser control application runs on the local IP address of the Pi on port 98
The video stream would load up and you can use the joystick on the screen to control the GoPiGo

Enjoy and keep hacking !!!

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