Tomomi Imura

Tomomi Imura

An Open Web advocate and front-end engineer, who loves everything mobile, and writes about HTML5, CSS, JS, UX, tech events, gadgets, etc. She unintentionally got 15min of fame by creating The HTTP Status Cats. Also, the opinions expressed here are solely her own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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Upgrading KittyCam with Raspberry Pi 3

I was excited when Raspberry Pi 3 came out earlier this year. According to raspberrypi.org, this 3rd generation Pi has faster CPU, WiFi, and Bluetooth 41. and BLE, additional to the previous model.

So I decided to upgrade KittyCam, a cat camera app built with my Raspberry Pi + Node.js project, which and I blogged about a while ago.

At that time, I was using the older Node v0.12.x (pre-IO.js, which I almost forgot about it happened after merged back with Node.js), so I decided to upgrade everything.

Install the Latest Raspbian

Since I got a brand-new Pi3, I install everything fresh, so instead of swapping the SD card from the old Pi, I installed the latest Raspbian build.

Forst, I download the latest Raspbian Jesse from raspberrypi.org to my Mac, then install it in a micro SD card using these instructions using dd tool.

In case you are also a MacBook Air user and don’t know, your MacBook has a SD card slot on the right hand side. But you will need an adapter.

SD card adapter

The image is from “SD Cards and Writing Images” by Sparkfun (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).

Installing Node 4

Last time with Node 0.12, I used the 3rd party node-arm to install it, but now ARM version is officially supported on nodejs.org.

So you can just open up a browser in Raspbian, and download from nodejs.org Download page:

Scroll the page down to Additional Platforms and choose ARMv7 (Note: I think ARMv8 works too, but I installed v7).

node download

or download and install on terminal as I did:

$ wget https://nodejs.org/dist/v4.4.5/node-v4.4.5-linux-armv7l.tar.xz
$ tar -xvf node-v4.4.5-linux-armv7l.tar.xz
$ cd node-v4.4.5-linux-armv7l
$ sudo cp -R * /usr/local/

Check if Node is successfully installed by checking its version:

$ node -v

If you wish, upgrade npm to v3 too.

$ npm install -g npm3

Installing Updated Dependencies for KittyCam

Create a KittyCam directory and copy everything except package.jsonfrom KittyCam repo. But also keep the node_modules/kittydar because installing kittydar using npm, and use it as is will fail, when you install Node-Canvas. (or tweak kittydar’s package.json manually!)

Installing Cairo

Get Cairo on your Raspbian bore installing Node-Canvas:

$ sudo apt-get install libcairo2-dev libjpeg8-dev libpango1.0-dev libgif-dev build-essential g++

Once set up with Cairo, in KittyCam dir,

$ npm install canvas

Installing Johnny-Five

Also, since the last time I created KittyCam, Johnny-Five and the IO-plugin for Raspberry Pi, Raspi-io have been upgraded a lot too. So just install the latest manually:

$ npm install johnny-five --save

$ npm install raspi-io --save

Installing All other Node Modules

and all other node modules used for KittyCam. In the app, I am also using Cloudinary and PubNub. You can install both with npm too.

Hardware Wiring

I have not updated any hardware besides Pi.

When you hook up with a camera, make sure to enable the camera module from the Pi Software Config Tool.

$ sudo raspi-config

Now, everything should work with Raspberry Pi 3!

I had chance to test it out while I was taking care of my friends’ cats!

QA Team

I have given the talk about KittyCam in a few conferences and meetups so far, such as NodePDX in Portland and ForwardJS in San Francisco. My slide deck is available on SlideShare!

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