How to stream video from the DeepRacer camera

Intro

I have been working on several projects that require individuals to get access to the DeepRacer camera.

• At UADE University, students needed access to the camera for some assignments.
• At a conference called Nerdearla, the video streaming team would like access to the car's camera to stream from it.

After hacking around with the car a little and with some hints from David Smith from AWS, I came up with the following process. I'm documenting it here for anyone needing it and a future version of me.

Backup Configuration Files

mkdir -p /home/deepracer/backup
cp /opt/aws/deepracer/lib/device_console/static/bundle.js /home/deepracer/backup/
cp /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default /home/deepracer/backup/site-config

Perform Configuration Changes

sudo sed -i "s/isVideoPlaying\: true/isVideoPlaying\: false/" /opt/aws/deepracer/lib/device_console/static/bundle.js
sudo sed -i "s/auth_request \/auth;/#auth_request \/auth;/" /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
systemctl restart nginx

Accessing The Car Camera

The URL to access the car camera is:

https://CAR_IP/route?topic=/camera_pkg/display_mjpeg&width=480&height=360

Please consider that this change disabled authentication on the ROS backend on the car, so make sure to do this only when you are working in an isolated network you trust.