October 23, 2024 | 08:00
Reading-Time: ca. 2 Min

Open source in the industry

A nice open source project from the industry. The new plant of a medium-sized company needed to be equipped with video surveillance and recording. Usually engineers use ready-to-use CCTV1 systems bought in DIY stores, consisting of a network-attached storage and a streaming server.

Nowadays, not that cheap Chinese blackboxes, usually tied together with Apps, Cloud and Online functionality without any chance of customization. Better keep away from this especially when information security, valueable corporate assets and the lives of people are at stake.

Control station with video surveillance in an industrial plant

For a bunch of cams, I have installed some Industrial PCs with GNU/Linux and OBS-Studio2. The streams are taken directly via RTSP3 and displayed on several control screens with a previously unknown degree of customization. For QC everything is recorded in the background.

The system runs on a hardened Debian4 with Gnome. Some automation is done with xdotool5 in bash. The entire system is centrally managed by Ansible and monitored using Zabbix. Updates and upgrades are ensured for the next years, if not for decades at least.

In the end, the involvement with video technology during Corona - some called it “playing around” - as well as the live events6 on the self-built open source streaming platform7 with Owncast8 finally paid off ;-)

Have a nice day,
Tomas Jakobs

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