mafeko / laps

timelaps setup taking images on a DSLR and syncing it to a remote server

laps 📷

This project is motivated by the need of an easy setup for a DSLR-timelaps using existing tools.

I'm using Tailscale (because of it's incredible easy setup) to keep the communication secure. Of course you set up laps without a vpn in place, but it is not recommended cause:

• vpn adds an additional layer of security around all networking (including the setup via ansible)

The architecture is composed of:

• a client (in my case a raspberryPi)

  • running a tailscale client
  • with a connected DSLR camera
  • running gphoto2 for DSLR remote control
  • running an rclone cron job: uploading the photos to my nextcloud (via webDAV)

• a server (in my case hosted on hetzner.de)

  • hosting a nextcloud instance (not part of this repository)

Setup

As mentioned above I rely on an already set up network connection via Tailscale VPN.

As a prerequisite you need:

• docker
• task

installed on your local machine.

The central place of configuration lives in ansible/inventory.yml. This file is the single source of thruth and all other files are populated with values from ansible/inventory.yml during provisioning.

The only mandatory configuration you have to make is the client's and server's IP adress for ansible to connect to:

all:
  hosts:
  children:
    client:
      hosts:
        100.95.134.119: # client's IP address (within the tailscale vpn)

For the rclone role the server-credentials are expected in a [gitignored] text file: ./secrets

LAPS_RCLONE_URL="https://your-nextcloud-server/remote.php/dav/files/<user>/"
LAPS_RCLONE_USER="user"
LAPS_RCLONE_PASS="base64 encoded password"

To provision the client run:

task client

For monitoring the client, I use prometheus installing node_exporter with some custom extensions (e.g. monitoring the number of pictures on the device):

task metrics

TODO

• (use ansible instead of scripts)
• (introduce lockfile for rclone cron job, preventing parallel upload processes)

MISC

SSH setup

ssh-keygen -f ./client.key -t ecdsa -b 521  
ssh-copy-id -i ./client.key user@host
mv client.key ansible/

Tailscale Installation

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https

curl -fsSL https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/raspbian/buster.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
curl -fsSL https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/raspbian/buster.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tailscale.list


sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tailscale

sudo tailscale up

Tailscale Logging

For practical reasons I completely turned off the tailscale logs in the service:

# /usr/lib/systemd/system/tailscaled.service

[Service]
StandardOutput=null
StandardError=null