The idea just originated with the fact that in our house you can hear someone at the door unless you're in the living-room and we typically leave the wooden door open with the security screen closed, so a camera could see through the screen if one were placed there and I could then have a feed in any room of the house or in the backyard showing me the front door. However this may evolve into something more permanent and less hackey as recently a ups shipment that was scanned in as delivered to my house, was no where to be found.
The netbook is a 1000HA eeepc and is currently running backtrack4, effectively ubuntu linux 9.10, and has essentially all the hardware one would desire in a cheap home surveillance camera.
- decent camera - check.
- audio out - check
- microphone - check
- wifi - check
- 6+ hours of battery life - check
Video streaming / DVR
I stumbled upon a package in ubuntu called "motion" which is a dvr/webserver for webcam based video inputs, and records images/video based on motion-detection software... perfect!First, Install the package
#apt-get install motion
Next, edit the config file
#vim /etc/motion.conf
I set the following values:- width 352
- height 288
- framerate 10
- threshold 500 (much higher sensitivity for motion based recording)
- target_dir /e/dvr (which is a mounted network share to a storage server)
- webcam_maxrate 10
#/etc/init.d/motion restart
2 comments:
What kind of camera did you use, if you don't mind me asking?
Just the built in eeepc camera at first, the whole idea was to just set the laptop up pointed at a window or through a security screen. I've since bought a couple of cheapo usb web-cams from bestbuy and they both worked flawlessly, my current favorite is a tiny dynex camera that sits in my front window.
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