[turboNath]

What do the following devices have in common ?
-An 8-year-old Nexus 10 tablet(that runs for less than 5 minutes on a fully charged battery)
-An 8-year-old (forgotten) Creative Webcam
-A Raspberry Pi Model 3B+
-A 10Ah Ambrane Powerbank

Well it’s the fact that all of these can work in tandem to provide a state-of-the-art , round the clock surveillance system!

The heart of the system - Raspberry Model 3B+



Display - Nexus 10 Tablet (it was an absolute beast of a tablet)



Creative Webcam of ancient origins - the eye of the system



Ambrane Powerbank 10Ah - the powerplant

The backdrop:

Quarantine weekends can be excruciatingly painful for petrol-heads. Nothing is worse than having to sit and watch your beloved machines gathering dust in the garage.
But what if you could lovingly gaze at them all the time, whenever you wanted with the additional benefit of recording any suspicious activity that might go on outside your home?
Let's do it, yeah !
This prompted me to come up with a DIY: CCTV home project with recyclable components. I already had the RPi (purchased it last year for a hackathon) along with a prehistoric web-camera and an extremely competent (useless as a ‘mobile’ device) Nexus10. And the best part was that all of these components were just lying around without any specific purpose/utility.

The Setup:

Thanks to the extremely active Raspberry Pi Users Community, it was fairly easy to install the required dependencies and packages onto my Pi. Fortunately it could also recognize the Creative Webcam without the need for any additional software installations.
After performing some modifications to the configuration file, I was ready to switch it on and leave it in the ‘production’ mode!
Our letterbox has acres of space to comfortably fit a Raspberry Pi(with its plastic enclosure), a 10Ah power bank and the webcam.

The complete setup looks like this :

The Webcam, R-Pi in its case and the Powerbank - Perfect fit

And the final view !

Connections,power & memory requirements :

I have found the 10Ah Powerbank to be sufficient to power both the pi and the webcam for the greater part of a day (will perform full 24 hour tests from tomorrow).
The Nexus 10 is being primarily used as a real time display, connected to its native charger.
The RPi has a 32GB class 10 micro-SD card (borrowed from my Go-Pro). Right now the recording is only on if there is a motion (and it exceeds the specified threshold of changing frames).
Since the RPi is connected to my home Wi-Fi, all the devices on my home network can easily access the real time video stream through the IP of the Rpi and the port (8081).
If there’s a need to keep the recording on throughout the day, I will think of mounting my external HDD and use it as a dedicated storage.
So there goes my DIY:CCTV project !

I have plenty of ideas to extend this project further like building a pet cam, running a real time video recognition feed to identify all the different species of birds that regularly show up on my bird feeder setup etc. Hope to turn them into reality someday!
Possibilities and utilities are limitless!

[Aditya]

Thread moved out from the Assembly Line. Thanks for sharing!

[deep_bang]

Thanks. Would you mind detailing the tools used for this?
I plan to do a similar thing but use the old phones at home as wireless cameras.

[blackwasp]

Superb thread there turboNath. This is the best part of Raspberry Pi - it makes you come up with ideas to use the existing hardware lying around your house.

Some more ideas for you:
1. Run an automatic number plate recognition system that will alert you if some other vehicle is in your spot.
2. Use the Raspberry Pi camera module (you can get IR one) for monitoring at night / watching the bird feeders in dark.

I used to tinker a lot with it in my college day, and at one point had a media sever running off it for movies and songs stored in a HDD. At came to and end when the HDD crashed

Maybe this lockdown will get me to restart my hobby for Raspberry pi.

[turboNath]

Originally Posted by deep_bang

Thanks. Would you mind detailing the tools used for this?
I plan to do a similar thing but use the old phones at home as wireless cameras.

Thanks deep_bang.
For this project I used my old android tablet, R-Pi Model 3B+ (connected to my home wi-fi).However. if you want to use your phone cam, I think an app like IP cam or Droid cam will come in handy for real time video streaming.
In that you won't be needing the Raspberry Pi.

Originally Posted by blackwasp

Superb thread there turboNath. This is the best part of Raspberry Pi - it makes you come up with ideas to use the existing hardware lying around your house.

Some more ideas for you:
1. Run an automatic number plate recognition system that will alert you if some other vehicle is in your spot.
2. Use the Raspberry Pi camera module (you can get IR one) for monitoring at night / watching the bird feeders in dark.

I used to tinker a lot with it in my college day, and at one point had a media sever running off it for movies and songs stored in a HDD. At came to and end when the HDD crashed

Maybe this lockdown will get me to restart my hobby for Raspberry pi.

Thanks for the great ideas blackwasp.
R-Pi is really a magician that fits in your pocket !
Using the Infra Pi-Cam for night time monitoring is a reallt great idea. I will order it post the lockdown.
I have also made some plans to use it as a tool for enabling precision farming real soon but time is a major constraint and that project seems distant.

[sandeepmohan]

Thanks for sharing. I have yet to fiddle with a Rasberry Pi. Seems like there are lots of use cases while keeping it budget friendly.

I don't have a lot of electronics lying around. For the time being, I have taken out the dash board camera from my car and mounted it on my bedroom window, looking out to the common area of the house. A 1 ampere Belkin phone charger feeds it power. A 128gb micro sd card is plenty for loop recording.

[turboNath]

Originally Posted by sandeepmohan

Thanks for sharing. I have yet to fiddle with a Rasberry Pi. Seems like there are lots of use cases while keeping it budget friendly.

I don't have a lot of electronics lying around. For the time being, I have taken out the dash board camera from my car and mounted it on my bedroom window, looking out to the common area of the house. A 1 ampere Belkin phone charger feeds it power. A 128gb micro sd card is plenty for loop recording.

Thanks Sandeep ! You have put your dashcam to good use!
As for the Pi, you can easily get a good board(or should I call it a 'PC' !)
under 4k(model 3B is cheaper at around 3k) and it can also function as your secondary PC(if you ever need one). Since it runs on Debian, it's really fast and clutter free unlike Windows !

[chiro3110]

Originally Posted by turboNath

I have plenty of ideas to extend this project further like building a pet cam, running a real time video recognition feed to identify all the different species of birds that regularly show up on my bird feeder setup etc. Hope to turn them into reality someday! Possibilities and utilities are limitless!

This is a fantastic idea and neatly done project!

But nitpicking a bit, what are your plans for the power delivery? The usage of the power bank won't be viable much once you start getting busy and may forget to switch it with a charged one. One idea could be to house the R-Pi connected to a wall outlet inside the house and using a USB-Cat5 extender (like this) to connect the webcam. This can be a cheaper and easy to implement option. Also curious on one thing, is the R-Pi powerful enough to run a video recognition program?

[turboNath]

Originally Posted by chiro3110

This is a fantastic idea and neatly done project!

But nitpicking a bit, what are your plans for the power delivery? The usage of the power bank won't be viable much once you start getting busy and may forget to switch it with a charged one. One idea could be to house the R-Pi connected to a wall outlet inside the house and using a USB-Cat5 extender (like this) to connect the webcam. This can be a cheaper and easy to implement option. Also curious on one thing, is the R-Pi powerful enough to run a video recognition program?

Thanks chiro3110 !
For now two power banks (each with 10000mAh capacity) are helping me run it 24X7. There's a power socket nearby inside our toolshed but that currently runs the pump. So I might need to add another three pin socket and hookup the pi with it for continuous power supply.
Your suggested USB-Cat5 will surely come in handy during that time ! Thanks !

Yes, R-Pi can aid several video recognition projects. You can easily install Open CV 4 on your pi and then the possibilities are limitless !

[ElonSkum]

That's a good hobby project.

But, do you plan to make that a permanent fixture? I hate to put a red flag here. This set up of yours wouldn't work long-term.

1. The webcam isn't rated for external duty. The humidity, UV rays, dust grime would kill it, i.e, unless your local postman, courier guy don't pinch it earlier. There's a reason why instruments are IP rated. It's antiquated yes, but still could be put to better use.

2. Your beautiful RPi would be dead too in a few months time housed in that environmentally exposed letter box.

3. Besides, economically it doesn't make sense. An RPi 3 B+, with a case, MicroSD and charger would cost you anywhere between 4-4.5K. 800 more if you are using a good quality power bank. So, in all around 6-6.5K, and where the MicroSD would give up the ghost in a few months time, if set to 24X7 high throughput read-write mode. They still on HDDs on DVRs for this very reason.

Decent 4 channel DVRs cost between 2-3K. 500 for a decent non HD camera. 3.5-4K for a CCTV HDD, and you have a secure reliable working solution, that would serve you years, hasslefree. And if you are really keen on having more control and playing around, you can explore DVRs with flashable firmwares, Linux based.

You can do so much more and better with an RPi.