Motion triggered camera

Posted by K1WIZ on December 2, 2016
Posted in: Projects.

I recently setup a wireless front door security camera to watch and notify of any visitors to our front porch.  During the holidays, there’s a lot of package stealing being reported in the news.  I am prepared!  My home made system does the following:

  • uses passive infrared (PIR) to detect motion within 30 feet
  • sends a push notification of the detection to my smartphone via pushover
  • records 2 minutes of 1080p video & converts it on the fly from H264 to .mp4
  • uploads the .mp4 file over wifi to my NAS for safe keeping and later viewing
  • sends another push notification when the .mp4 file is uploaded
  • continues to watch for the next motion event to record

The camera and PIR sensor are mounted in a weatherproof enclosure and can be powered from any DC source from 7-35v.  Here are some close up pictures.  Click for larger image:

file_000 file_001 file_002 file_003

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The logic:

  • PIR motion event causes the sensor to send a 3v signal to GPIO pin 26 on the raspberry pi computer.
  • When pin 26 goes high, it is read by the “detect” function and stored in a variable.
  • The IF logic uses the variable for detection to either process video recording or return to the continuous loop.
  • The continuous loop runs every second

How to setup:

  • grab the latest copy of raspbian-jessie-lite image (no gui)
  • burn jessie lite image to MicroSD card
  • run raspi-config to set options (internationalisation, and turn the camera socket on if using a camera module – recommended)
  • log in using raspbian default pi user and install necessary packages, update, & reboot the pi:
    • sudo apt-get update
    • sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
    • sudo reboot
    • sudo apt-get install rsync wiringpi gpac htop exfat-fuse exfat-utils
  • insert a large capacity USB stick to cache video recording to & format it with exfat file system and mount to /video
    • fdisk /dev/sda (change partition to type exfat)
    • mkfs.exfat -n video /dev/sda1
    • create /video directory
    • edit /etc/fstab and set mount point for USB exfat key to /video (this ensures the USB is mounted on each boot) Your video files will process on the USB key before being uploaded by rsync (you need a NAS or server that can receive the incoming rsync stream).
  • setup wifi (/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf)

wifi-setup

 

The loop is a simple bash loop called by /etc/rc.local and runs whenever the unit is turned on:

loop

 

The file containing the functions does all the heavy lifting:

pi-mocam