With the touchscreen, camera, and Youtube streaming all working, all we need now is a simple interface to control it. My vision is to have it so that you can preview the camera, using the touchscreen as a view finder, and then click a button to stream it to Youtube.

The vision I have is very similar to the Adafruit Pi Camera project. I like it because it uses the camera feed as the background of the touchscreen. It basically uses the io.BytesIO library to stream the buffer of camera images to use as background images on the touchscreen.

We want to have 3 buttons on the touchscreen:

  • Stream - Pressing this will stream the camera and audio to Youtube
  • Preview - Pressing this will show a preview of the camera on the LCD screen
  • Power - Pressing this will shutdown the Operating System

So combining that with our streaming code, and our touchscreen code, I came up with something like this:

Sample Python Code - youtube_stream.py

#!/usr/bin/env python 
import os 
import time 
import io 
import pygame 
import picamera 
import subprocess 
os.environ['SDL_VIDEODRIVER'] = 'fbcon' 
os.environ['SDL_FBDEV'] = '/dev/fb1' 
os.environ['SDL_MOUSEDEV'] = '/dev/input/touchscreen' 
os.environ['SDL_MOUSEDRV'] = 'TSLIB' 
pygame.init() 
lcd = pygame.display.set_mode((0,0), pygame.FULLSCREEN) 
pygame.mouse.set_visible(False) 
img_bg = pygame.image.load('/home/pi/camera_bg.jpg') 
preview_toggle = 0 
stream_toggle = 0 
blue = 26, 0, 255 
white = 255, 255, 255 
cream = 254, 255, 250 
YOUTUBE="rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/"		 
KEY= #ENTER PRIVATE KEY HERE#				 
stream_cmd = 'ffmpeg -f h264 -r 25 -i - -itsoffset 5.5 -fflags nobuffer -f alsa -ac 1 -i hw:1,0 -vcodec copy -acodec aac -ac 1 -ar 8000 -ab 32k -map 0:0 -map 1:0 -strict experimental -f flv ' + YOUTUBE + KEY
stream_pipe = subprocess.Popen(stream_cmd, shell=True, stdin=subprocess.PIPE) 
camera = picamera.PiCamera() 
camera.resolution = (1080, 720) 
camera.rotation   = 180	 
camera.crop       = (0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0) 
camera.framerate  = 25 
rgb = bytearray(camera.resolution[0] * camera.resolution[1] * 3) 
def make_button(text, xpo, ypo, color): 
       font=pygame.font.Font(None,24)	 
       label=font.render(str(text),1,(color)) 
       lcd.blit(label,(xpo,ypo)) 
       pygame.draw.rect(lcd, cream, (xpo-5,ypo-5,150,35),1) 
def stream(): 
	camera.wait_recording(1) 
def shutdown_pi(): 
       os.system("sudo shutdown -h now") 
def preview(): 
	stream = io.BytesIO() 
	camera.vflip = True
	camera.hflip = True 
	camera.capture(stream, use_video_port=True, format='rgb', resize=(320, 240)) 
	stream.seek(0) 
	stream.readinto(rgb) 
	stream.close() 
	img = pygame.image.frombuffer(rgb[0:(320 * 240 * 3)], (320, 240), 'RGB') 
	lcd.blit(img, (0,0)) 
	make_button("STOP", 175,200, white) 
	pygame.display.update() 
try: 
	while True: 
		if stream_toggle == 1: 
			stream() 
		elif preview_toggle == 1: 
			preview() 
		else: 
			click_count = 0		 
			lcd.fill(blue) 
			lcd.blit(img_bg,(0,0)) 
			make_button("STREAM", 5, 200, white) 
			make_button("PREVIEW",175,200, white) 
                        make_button("POWER", 200, 5, white) 
			pygame.display.update() 
		for event in pygame.event.get(): 
			if (event.type == pygame.MOUSEBUTTONDOWN): 
				pos = pygame.mouse.get_pos() 
			if (event.type == pygame.MOUSEBUTTONUP): 
				pos = pygame.mouse.get_pos() 
				print pos 
				x,y = pos 
				if y > 100: 
					if x < 200: 
						print "stream pressed" 
						if stream_toggle == 0 and preview_toggle == 0: 
							stream_toggle = 1 
							lcd.fill(blue) 
							lcd.blit(img_bg,(0,0)) 
							make_button("STOP", 20, 200, white) 
							pygame.display.update() 
							camera.vflip=True 
							camera.hflip = True 
							camera.start_recording(stream_pipe.stdin, format='h264', bitrate = 2000000) 
						elif preview_toggle == 1: 
							preview_toggle = 0 
							lcd.fill(blue) 
							lcd.blit(img_bg,(0,0)) 
							make_button("STREAM", 5, 200, white) 
							make_button("PREVIEW",175,200, white) 
							pygame.display.update() 
						else: 
							stream_toggle = 0 
							lcd.fill(blue) 
							make_button("STREAM", 5, 200, white) 
							make_button("PREVIEW",175,200, white) 
							pygame.display.update() 
							camera.stop_recording() 
					elif x > 225: 
						print "preview pressed" 
						if preview_toggle == 0 and stream_toggle == 0: 
							preview_toggle = 1 
							lcd.fill(blue) 
							make_button("STOP", 175,200, white) 
							pygame.display.update() 
						elif stream_toggle == 1: 
							stream_toggle = 0 
							lcd.fill(blue) 
							make_button("STREAM", 5, 200, white) 
							make_button("PREVIEW",175,200, white) 
							pygame.display.update() 
							camera.stop_recording() 
						else: 
							preview_toggle = 0 
							lcd.fill(blue) 
							make_button("STREAM", 5, 200, white) 
							make_button("PREVIEW",175,200, white) 
							pygame.display.update() 
except KeyboardInterrupt: 
	camera.stop_recording() 
	print ' Exit Key Pressed' 
finally: 
	camera.close() 
	stream_pipe.stdin.close() 
	stream_pipe.wait() 
	print("Camera safely shut down") 
	print("Good bye")

Customize the script the way you want to make it work for you, and then test it out. Just run it using

sudo python youtube_stream.py

Then click on the "Preview" button to preview your camera. Press "Stop" to go back to the main menu. Then click the "Stream" button to start streaming to Youtube. Now you should be able to go to your Youtube Live dashboard and preview your live stream!

Once you're happy with the results, the last thing to do is to make the script executable and add it to the Pi's rc.local file so that it auto-launches whenever the Pi boots up

sudo chmod +x youtube_stream.py
sudo nano /etc/rc.local

Towards the bottom of the rc.local file, right before "exit 0", add this line:

sudo python /home/pi/youtube_stream.py &

Save it and reboot the Pi. Once it's through rebooting, you should see your new touchscreen interface!

This guide was first published on Sep 15, 2017. It was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

This page (Creating An Interface) was last updated on Sep 12, 2017.

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