My daughter recently had a thief enter her apartment and steal her laptop computer. Later, when I asked her what she wanted for Christmas, her answer was immediate: a security camera, so in case she is robbed again she will have pictures of the thief to give to the police. But commercial security cameras are expensive, often several hundred dollars, and many are tied to security services with expensive monthly fees, which she wasn’t interested in paying.
This tutorial describes the construction of a security camera using a Raspberry Pi single-board computer as the embedded controller. The parts cost about a hundred dollars, construction takes no more than an hour or two, and there is no on-going monthly cost. The result is a camera that saves pictures offsite and sends an email whenever it detects motion. In addition to the security camera, you must have an always-on internet connection with a wifi router. If you don’t, you can still build the security camera as described here, but pictures will be stored in the camera, rather than offsite, so if the thief steals the camera, he will take his picture with him.
Hardware: Six parts are required to build the security camera, all readily available from on-line suppliers such as Amazon, Newegg, or Adafruit or from brick-and-mortar stores like Fry’s Electronics or Micro Center:
| Raspberry Pi Model B+ | $ 35 |
| Raspberry Pi Camera Module | 30 |
| Wifi dongle | 12 |
| 5V 1A power supply, micro USB | 7 |
| 8GB Micro SD card, Class 10 | 6 |
| Case | 10 |
| Total | $100 |
The Raspberry Pi Model B+ single-board computer is used as the embedded controller of the security camera system. From the many small single-board computers currently available we choose the Raspberry Pi because it is inexpensive, widely supported, and sufficient for our needs. Recommended retail price of the Raspberry Pi Model B+ is $35, but sometimes you will have to pay a little bit more or less than that. The $20 Raspberry Pi Model A+ should also work for the security camera, though setup will be harder because it doesn’t have an ethernet port.
For the camera we choose the Raspberry Pi Camera Module, available for $30. If you want low-light infrared pictures, you could instead choose the Raspberry Pi Infrared Camera Module. If you use the Model B+, you could instead use any webcam you wish; you can’t use a webcam with the Model A+ because it has only one USB port, and we use that for the wifi dongle. We use the Raspberry Pi Camera Module because it is small and easily hidden. The camera plugs in on the surface-mounted port near the ethernet port, with the wires facing away from the ethernet port.
The security camera communicates with the internet using wifi, so you will need a thumb-nail sized wifi dongle. Any brand will do. In the early days of the Raspberry Pi, some wifi dongles were supported while others were not, but most of that problem is now in the past, and you should be able to use just about any wifi dongle. The price will be somewhere in the $10 to $12 range.
Any 5V 1A or 5V 2A power supply with a micro-USB connector will be suitable to supply power to the security camera; these are commonly sold as cellphone chargers. Beware that some cellphone-charger power supplies, though they look suitable, provide only 500mA or 700mA and should not be used, so read the label carefully. You should buy a power supply with a cord that blends in with your decor if you want to hide it; black cords are common, white cords are not uncommon, and cords in other colors are available but not always easy to find.
You will need a micro SD card, either empty or formatted with Raspbian Wheezy. A 4GB card is probably sufficient, an 8GB card is certainly sufficient, and anything larger is also fine. Be sure to buy a faster Class 10 card rather than the slower Class 4 card. It’s easier to get started if you buy an SD card with Raspbian Wheezy already installed, though you can image the card yourself if you have an internet-attached computer with an SD card reader/writer. You might also want to buy a spare SD card to make a backup.
Although it’s not strictly necessary, you will probably want to buy a case to protect your Raspberry Pi.
We assume that your environment includes a wifi router connected to the internet, so you can send your pictures off-site.
Preparing the Raspberry Pi: The first step in the construction of the security camera is to perform the basic setup of the Raspberry Pi. It is also the trickiest step, with several different ways to do things depending on what kind of equipment you have available. If you have a pre-imaged SD card, you can connect a monitor, keyboard and mouse to the Raspberry Pi and set it up directly. Otherwise, you can image the SD card on some other computer, then connect the Raspberry Pi to your router and access it via ssh. And there are other ways to get set up, depending on your situation.
Instead of trying — and doubtless failing — to cover all the possibilities, we will point you to two useful resources. The Raspberry Pi Foundation, which produces the Raspberry Pi, has a web site at http://www.raspberrypi.org that provides tutorials and forums to get you started: click on the Help tab and look around, or ask in the Forums if you have specific questions. Don’t be shy, and don’t think your question is too stupid to ask; everyone on the forum was once in your position, and they read the forums because they are happy to help new users get started. Another useful site is Adafruit, which sells and supports the Raspberry Pi and many other small computers: go to https://learn.adafruit.com/category/learn-raspberry-pi and read the first several tutorials.
When you finish setting up, you should have a Raspberry Pi running the Debian Wheezy operating system, configured with 128MB or more of graphics memory and with the camera enabled on raspi-config, able to login to user pi with password raspberry and able to access the Raspberry Pi’s terminal window via ssh to a known ip address over the local network.
All system setup of the security camera is done by editing configuration files. If you’re not familiar with working at the command line, an easy editor is nano. To edit a file, open the terminal window, then say sudo nano /path/to/file; for instance, to edit the /etc/motion/motion.conf file, open the terminal window, type sudo nano /etc/motion/motion.conf, and press the Enter key. Sometimes you will be prompted for your password; if you are, type your password raspberry and press the Enter key. The nano editor has a window in which your text appears, and a menu of control-key combinations at the bottom. If you need help with nano, go to http://www.nano-editor.org. Some of the configuration is done in the crontab file; to edit that file, say sudo crontab -e, then use the nano editor to edit the crontab file as recommended.
If you haven’t done so already, you should login to the Raspberry Pi and execute the following commands in a terminal window:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo rpi-update
sudo shutdown -r now
Those commands bring the software on your Raspberry Pi up to date. To keep your Raspberry Pi up to date in the future, automatically, add this line to crontab:
5 3 * * sun sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade
This command causes the cron daemon to run the update and upgrade commands weekly, every Sunday morning at 3:05am; we don’t run dist-upgrade or rpi-update because they require a reboot, though you may want to run them manually from time to time. If you want to know more about cron, http://www.raspberrypi.org has a page that will help.
By the way, SD cards aren’t particularly robust, so it is a matter of when, not if, your SD card will become corrupt. There’s no need to back up the pictures taken by the security camera, since they are all stored offsite and are useless once you know that you haven’t had a break-in, but once you have a working system you should make a copy of the SD card so you don’t have to do all this configuration again when your SD card becomes corrupt. On a Linux or Mac computer, you can copy the SD card by inserting it into another computer and entering the following command, substituting for /dev/sdb and /path/to/sdcard.img as appropriate:
sudo dd bs=4M if=/dev/sdb of=/path/to/sdcard.img
It’s not hard to find the device where your SD card resides. Say df before inserting the SD card in the slot, then say df again after inserting the SD card in the slot, and note the two new devices that are reported; they will differ in their last character, but the prefix of both devices will be the same, and that is the if input file that you should use. To copy the saved image onto a new SD card, just reverse if and of. Windows systems have other ways of performing this function, which you can find by consulting Google (search for “windows usb image writer”).
Network Configuration: The next step configures the network. You may have done some sort of network configuration as part of the basic setup instructions, but it will be easier to configure the security camera using a static ip address, whereas most basic setup instructions provide a dynamic ip address via DHCP. We will assume that you have access to the terminal window of your Raspberry Pi over the local network, as in the previous step, though there are other ways to access it if you don’t. If you didn’t discover the ip address of your Raspberry Pi during the initial network configuration, you might be able to log in by saying ssh pi@raspberrypi from your computer connected to the same router.
Assuming that you don’t already know the ip address of your Raspberry Pi, from a terminal window it is easy to do the little bit of detective work that is necessary. The ifconfig command tells you two things, the current ip address and the netmask. You’ll find both in the eth0 section of the output from ifconfig. Here’s the result from my system, showing the current ip address as 192.168.1.65 and the netmask as 255.255.255.0:
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr b8:27:eb:f8:95:ce
inet addr:192.168.1.65 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:596 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:100 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:33365 (32.5 KiB) TX bytes:11758 (11.4 KiB)
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:65536 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
The other thing you need to figure out is the gateway address, which is the local network address of your router. To do that, run the netstat -nr command and look in the “Gateway” column. Here’s mine, showing a gateway address of 192.168.1.254; note that the first three octets are the same as ip address, which is (almost) always true:
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ netstat -nr
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags MSS Window irtt Iface
0.0.0.0 192.168.1.254 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0
192.168.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
Although it is possible that it might be something different, the netmask is most likely 255.255.255.0; if it is, then the first three octets of the ip address and gateway address will be identical. It is common for the first two octets of the ip address and gateway address to be 192 and 168, as these numbers are reserved for local networks. The third octet is usually small; numbers like 0, 1 or 2 are common. The fourth octet can be anything, depending on the software that controls the router.
Another way to find this information is to connect to your router directly. It is often possible to open your browser and connect to http://router, and then you can poke around to find all these settings; each router, unfortunately, hides them in different places. Your router might also have a sticker that tells you the local network address of your router; mine, for instance, has a sticker that tells me to connect to http://192.168.1.254 for advanced settings. Or you might check http://portforwarding.com for information about your router.
You also need to know the userid and password by which you connect to the router; some systems call them the SSID and Network Key. If you rent your router from your internet service provider, they gave you that information at the time you started service; mine is on a sticker attached to the router. Or if you have your own router, it is somewhere in the documentation, or perhaps printed on the box that the router came in.
Once you have everything you need, edit the /etc/network/interfaces file to add a wlan0 interface; the file should look like this, but using the routing information you collected above:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet static
address 192.168.1.65
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.254
wpa-ssid "YOUR_USERID"
wpa-psk "YOUR_PASSWORD"
iface default inet dhcp
After you’ve finished the network configuration, you should shut down the Raspberry Pi with sudo shutdown -h now, remove power and the network cable, insert the wifi dongle, reboot, and make sure that you can connect wirelessly with the command ssh pi@192.168.1.65 or whatever ip address you specified.
Motion: The heart of the security camera system is the motion command. Although you will want to read the guide at http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/MotionGuide to learn all of its complexities, it’s not too hard to get started. Begin by installing motion with the command sudo apt-get install motion.
Before looking at motion itself, you need to do a few things with the operating system. First, install the V4L Video For Linux driver that motion uses to connect to the camera. For testing, issue the command sudo modprobe bcm2835-v4l2 (that’s the letter ell, not the digit one). To install the driver every time the Raspberry Pi boots, add the following line to the /etc/modules file:
bcm2835-v4l2
You will also need to create a directory where motion writes files by saying sudo mkdir /var/run/motion, then set permissions sudo chmod 777 /var/run/motion so user pi is able to access the directory. Also create a directory to store images by saying sudo mkdir /tmp/motion and sudo chmod 777 /tmp/motion. And you probably want to turn off the lamp on the camera, so as not to draw attention to it, by adding this line to the /boot/config.txt file:
disable_camera_led=1
Finally, you need to add a line to the /etc/default/motion file to automatically start the motion command every time you boot your Raspberry Pi:
start_motion_daemon=yes
The actions of Motion are controlled by the /etc/motion/motion.conf file, which you should make accessible to user pi by saying sudo chmod 777 /etc/motion/motion.conf. The file is large, with many options described in the guide. Here is a recommended list of options for you to change:
daemon on
width 320
height 240
threshold 500
gap 3
snapshot_interval 600
text_right %m/%d/%y %T
target_dir /tmp/motion
webcam_port 0
on_event_start mail -s "Motion detected" YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS < /dev/null
on_picture_save mpack -s "Living Room" \%f YOUR_ACCOUNT@sendtodropbox.com
The daemon on parameter starts the program operating.
The width and height of your picture are controlled by the width and height parameters. You will have to experiment to determine the width and height that are suitable for you. You don’t want your picture to be too small, because then you won’t be able to recognize the thief. You also don’t want the picture to be too large, because it will take too much time to process each picture during a motion event. You might like to try 480 × 352 or 640 × 480 to see how they work. Be aware that motion requires both width and height to be multiples of 16.
The threshold parameter determines how many pixels must change between two successive pictures before motion determines that a motion event has started. A smaller value makes the system more sensitive to small changes, such as when a pet walks through the camera range or blowing air from the air conditioner roils the vertical blinds. A too-large value might cause you to miss a thief. You will probably want to try several different values before you decide how to set this parameter.
The gap parameter tells motion to determine the end of a motion event when the indicated number of seconds has passed without motion. The supplied configuration file sets this parameter to 60, but you probably want to make it much smaller, because during each motion event motion will be saving pictures every second, and there’s no need to see multiple versions of the same picture at the end of the motion event. If you make gap too small, however, you will get many email notifications when motion occurs, one at the start of each of several motion events that occur in quick succession.
The snapshot_interval parameter causes a “heartbeat” picture to be saved every ten minutes so you know the system is still alive and operating. The text_right parameter causes the current date and time to be printed in the lower right hand corner of the picture. The target_dir parameter specifies where pictures are stored. The webcam_port parameter turns off the internal web server, which is not needed for this application.
The on_event_startparameter sends email to your account at the start of each motion event using the Linux mail command. The -s parameter specifies the subject line of the email; change it to your liking. The < /dev/null parameter causes the body of the email to be empty. You should specify an email address in YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS that you monitor regularly, so that you are notified of motion on a timely basis.
The on_picture_save command causes a picture to be saved to your Dropbox account, for both the heartbeat picture and any pictures taken during motion events. The parameters of the mpack command are the subject, which describes the location of the camera in case you want to distinguish between multiple security cameras; the filename of the picture being saved, specified as %f; and the email address is specific to your Dropbox account, which we discuss shortly.
It will take some experimentation to determine the proper settings for many of these parameters, and you may find that you change your mind about some of the settings over time. You should also read the guide manual for the motion command, which has many other parameters that may be of interest.
You will want to periodically remove old pictures. To do that automatically, add this line to crontab, which runs every morning at 3:10am and deletes all pictures over two weeks old:
10 3 * * * find /tmp/motion -name *.jpg -mtime +14 -exec rm -f \{\} \;
Due to the entry in /etc/default/motion, the camera restarts itself every time the Raspberry Pi reboots. To interactively start or stop the camera, say sudo /etc/init.d/motion start or sudo /etc/init.d/motion stop. If you like, you can add those commands to your crontab to start and stop the camera each day at specified times; for instance, these commands set the camera to run each weekday from 7:15am to 5:45pm:
15 7 * * mon,tue,wed,thu,fri /etc/init.d/motion start
45 17 * * mon,tue,wed,thu,fri /etc/init.d/motion stop
Offsite File Storage: As we have said previously, we want to send our pictures offsite for safekeeping. There are many ways to do that — Google Drive, Amazon S3, another Raspberry Pi at your neighbor’s house — but we choose Dropbox, because it is simple to set up and works well by sending the pictures via email.
The standard Raspbian distribution of Debian Wheezy doesn’t include an email system, so we need to install some method for sending email. The traditional method of sending email uses a mail transfer agent on your computer, frequently the sendmail program. But that’s a rather heavyweight solution to a simple problem, and it’s not certain that a Raspberry Pi could handle the load of the mailer in addition to the camera. Instead, we will use Google’s servers to process the mail, using a system called ssmtp, which you can install with the command sudo apt-get install ssmtp mailutils mpack; though official documentation is lacking, a good description of the process is available at http://iqjar.com/jar/sending-emails-from-the-raspberry-pi/. Begin by setting up a free Google account at http://accounts.google.com; if you already have a Google account, you will probably want to create a new one, so that your camera’s use of the account doesn’t interfere with your primary email account. Then edit the /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf file to include the following lines, substituting the username and password of your new Google account where indicated:
root=postmaster
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
hostname=raspberrypi
AuthUser=YOUR_USERID@gmail.com
AuthPass=YOUR_PASSWORD
UseSTARTTLS=YES
It’s not ideal to store your username and password in cleartext in the configuration file, but this Google account is used only for your camera to forward mail, so it doesn’t matter too much; this weakness is the primary reason for obtaining a new Google account. As a matter of basic password hygiene, do not use the same password for this account that you use anywhere else. You will need to edit the /etc/ssmtp/revaliases file to allow user pi to send email; we also set up email for the root user, because it might be handy some day, though it’s not strictly necessary for our application:
pi:pi@raspberrypi:smtp.gmail.com:587
root:root@raspberrypi:smtp.gmail.com:587
Finally, execute the commands sudo chmod 774 /etc/ssmpt/ssmtp.conf and sudo chmod 774 /etc/ssmtp/revaliases to give user \code{pi} access to the configuration files. Then, while you’re logged in to your new Google account, go to https://www.google.com/settings/security/lesssecureapps and enable access for less secure apps. That setting allows you to send email through Google’s servers without the normal two-factor authentication that Google requires, which is impossible to automate. Reducing the security of your email account is another reason to set up a new Google account instead of using an existing account.
To store files at Dropbox you will need an account; if you don’t already have one, go to http://dropbox.com and create one. Then go to http://sendtodropbox.com and create an account that will let you email your pictures to your Dropbox account; the email address that you are given at sendtodropbox should be copied into the on_picture_save parameter in the motion.conf file. You should set up the sendtodropbox account to store pictures in the Attachments/Date/Filename destination; if you have multiple cameras with the camera name in the subject line of the email, store them in the Attachments/Date/Subject/Filename destination. Both Dropbox and sendtodropbox offer free accounts.
Unlike Linux cron, Dropbox provides no way to automatically delete files after a specified amount of time, so you will have to periodically log in to your Dropbox account and delete each day’s folder manually.
Wrapping Up: You should situate your camera so it has a good view of the entrance to your apartment or of the door to the room where your valuables are stored, so you get a good picture of the thief. In some cases you might want to have more than one security camera operating in different locations. Be sure to arrange sufficient lighting to get a good picture.
You can display the camera openly, or hide it; there are arguments on both sides. One possibility is to buy a security camera housing (they are designed to be used as decoys, cheap at about $10, and weathertight so you can use them outdoors) and fit the Raspberry Pi and camera inside it. As an example of the alternative, my daughter’s security camera is hidden in a box of kleenex with a quarter-inch hole cut in the side and the Raspberry Pi sitting underneath the stack of tissues; the power cord that comes out the back of the box is hidden in the clutter on the kitchen counter. A clever possibility is to have both an obvious camera and another that is hidden.
Thankfully, my daughter’s security camera hasn’t caught a thief. But it does get tested every day when she walks in the front door and gets a “Welcome Home” picture of herself.
Programming Praxis 