Devon Bray's RasRig Streaming Setup Makes Great Use of Older Raspberry Pi Single-Board Computers

Engineer Devon Bray has put together a slick setup for live-streaming projects that combine software and hardware — and at the heart of it is a modular camera system running from Raspberry Pi single-board computers, including a launch-day Raspberry Pi Model B.

"Being able to capture the flow between the computer and the workbench is a critical requirement for engineering streams," Bray explains of his video streamin setup. "This necessitates having a bunch of different cameras in a bunch of different places throughout the work space. In my case, I wanted a cost-effective way to have at least three different simultaneous shots of the bench. After some experimentation, I found that mjpg-streamer running on a Raspberry Pi using a camera connected via the CSI [Camera Serial Interface] port can do a great job of getting video into OBS."

The Raspberry Pi range of single-board computers remains a popular choice for video streaming work, thanks to a range of features including either dedicated hardware encoders or a fast enough processor for real-time software encoding in a low power envelope and the presence of at least one MIPI Camera Serial Interface input on most models — two for the Raspberry Pi 5 and many carrier boards for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, though none on the Raspberry Pi 400 and original-model. Add in the low cost for a model suitable for live streaming, and you've got a tempting base on which to build.

Bray's setup, which he calls the RasRig, sees multiple Raspberry Pi boards each with their own camera module deployed on a single network — making streaming and remote control simple. 3D-printed mounting plates support the standard Raspberry Pi Camera Module family, the Raspberry Pi HQ Camera Module with its interchangeable lenses, Omnivision OV5647 wide-angle camera modules, and one for C-mount microscope lenses for when you need to get up super close and personal.

"The hardware is designed to be able to easily switch out cameras/Pis with an emphasis on compatibility across different hardware generations," Bray explains. "[One is a] launch-day [Raspberry] Pi [Model B]. Still works great, can do 30 FPS [Frames Per Second] video over the network no problem."

A full walkthrough of the setup, including links to 3D print files, is available on Bray's website; the software, which uses Ansible to simplify setup and configuration of each Raspberry Pi in the rig, is available on GitHub under an unspecified license — with the caveat that it's only compatible with the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and older, and requires the older Debian Buster version of Raspberry Pi OS. Additional information is available in Bray's Reddit post.