Wireless camera system on a budget

Michael Pope (@map7)

MLUG Feb, 2014

Disclaimer

• Wireless cameras are not fool proof
• Batteries in old phones are unreliable

Re-use

• Old/Smashed phones
• Network/computers already there
• Use USB cameras 'mjpg_streamer'

Hardware used

• OLD android mobile phones
• Phone to camera mount
• Ceiling brakets
• WIFI Router
• Linux box (recording)

Phone mount

$7 from ebay

Bracket

$2.30 from ebay

Android phone server

• IP Webcam
• Android 1.6+
• Load through 'adb install IP\ Webcam.apk'

Android phone viewing

• IP Cam Viewer (Basic/Lite/Pro)
• Basic/Lite are Free
• View heaps of cameras at once

Recording software 'Motion'

• Fast
• Low resources
• no dependencies
• flexible
• Uses mpeg/jpg output

Recording setup

• Settings in /etc/motion/motion.conf
• Balance file size vs performance
• Make sure it starts on boot

Enable on boot

start_motion_daemon=yes

Example motion.conf

# ffv1 codec works best
ffmpeg_video_codec ffv1

netcam_url http://10.0.0.100:8080/videofeed

target_dir /media/data/recordings

width 640
height 480
framerate 15

# View video feed from any computer
control_localhost off

Remove old recordings

# Remove over 60 days, put into /etc/crontab
/usr/bin/find /recordings -mtime +60 -exec rm {} \;

Multi-camera example

netcam_url http://10.0.0.101:8080/videofeed
target_dir /media/data/recordings/kitchen
webcam_port 8081

Recording requirements

• Spare computer running Linux
• About 1GB per day per camera

Questions