Tag archive for: motionEye

How to setup a Raspberry Pi security camera for home surveillance with Raspbian Buster Lite and motionEye

Even though a Raspberry Pi security camera is not the cheapest surveillance camera, it can be worthwhile building one.

Especially for Raspberry Pi fans, you may have several unused Raspberry Pis because you buy one for each release. In such a case, a big part of your Raspberry Pi security camera is sunken cost.

Given that, let’s look at how we can setup a Raspberry Pi security camera with Raspbian Buster Lite and motionEye.

How to turn your Raspberry Pi Zero W CCTV into a wide angle security camera

When Raspberry Pi Zero W appeared in the market, I immediately got one and setup a Raspberry Pi Zero W security camera with motionEyeOS. In addition to taking half the size of a credit card, a Raspberry Pi Zero W comes with Wi-Fi inbuilt. Therefore, it is ideal for building a security camera that connects to your Wi-Fi network.

Previously, I wrote about how to make your Raspberry Pi Zero W camera see an ultra-wide view through a Fisheye lens.

Since the pack of Camera Lens Kits for mobile phones includes a 0.67x wide angle lens, I decided to use it to turn my other Raspberry Pi Zero W CCTV into a wide angle security camera.

If you need a reference, read this to find out how you can turn your Raspberry Pi Zero W CCTV into a wide angle security camera.

How to configure motionEye to only capture video if there are movements in particular sections of the surveillance area

Undeniably, Calin Crisan had created one of the best way for us to build a Raspberry Pi security camera. In addition to the ease of setup via motionEyeOS, the motionEye web-based frontend is also easy to use.

Since a Raspberry Pi security camera is used for surveillance, we will want it to record videos of things that happened when we were not looking.

However, recording footages of the surveillance area when there were no motion being detected is wasteful. Moreover, it is hard to get to the video recording of a stranger moving your flower pot when there are too many redundant video clips in your Raspberry Pi security camera.

Even if we switched on motion detection for the entire video frame, there could be motion detected outside of the area of interest. For example, we may be interested in birds resting on our plant rather than birds flying in the sky.

So how do we configure motionEye to only capture video if there are movements in a particular section of the surveillance area?

This post will show you how to do so.

How to make your Raspberry Pi Zero W camera see an ultra-wide view

While I was organising cabinet, I found a pack of Camera Lens Kits for mobile phones.

Since I am using my Raspberry Pi Zero W as a surveillance camera, I figured that it would be useful if I can use the Fisheye lens in the pack to make my camera see a wider view.

This post shows how you can make a Raspberry Pi Zero W camera see an ultra-wide view.

How I setup a Raspberry Pi Zero W CCTV camera with motionEye and Raspbian Stretch Lite

I had previously built a Raspberry Pi Zero W CCTV camera with motionEyeOS which was connected to the Wifi network of my old DLink router.

After I started using Linksys AC1900 Dual Band Wireless Router as my home router, I could no longer connect to that Raspberry Pi Zero W CCTV camera.

After reinstalling motionEyeOS a couple of times on my Raspberry Pi Zero W, I determined that motionEyeOS is not suitable for this new Wifi network.

On the other hand, my setup of WordPress on Raspberry Pi Zero W with Raspbian Stretch Lite, nginx, mariadb and PHP was able to connect to my new Wifi network, even after multiple system reboots.

Hence, I figured that if I wanted to build a Raspberry Pi Zero W CCTV camera that can connect to my new Wifi network, I could use Raspbian Stretch Lite as the base operating system and install motionEye for the web frontend to view the camera footage.

This post documents how I setup a Raspberry Pi Zero W CCTV with motionEye and Raspbian Stretch Lite.