Traditional wireless CCTV cameras are cheap but anyone with a wireless receiver can view your signal. On the other hand, IP cameras are secure but they can be quite expensive and usually the video quality is poor — unless you go for a really expensive model.
Necessary hardware:
- Raspberry Pi Model B Revision 2.0 (512MB)
- Logitech HD Webcam C270 or a similarly compatible usb webcam (list of compatible webcams here).
- A usb hub with an external power supply
- (optional): a usb extension cable
Step #1: Setup your raspberry pi
Your pi needs to boot a linux operating system in order to run motion. The most popular choice is Raspbian, a debian-based OS that is optimized for pi’s hardware.
To prepare your SD card and install Raspbian I recommend following Adafruit’s excellent tutorials here.
Since you are not going to have your pi connected to a monitor or have a keyboard and mouse, I also recommend enabling Secure Shell (SSH) in your pi so that you can remote control your Raspberry Pi over your local network.
Finally, it is a good thing to force a static IP address so that you can easily find the webcam server even if pi restarts.
To do this, first type from the command prompt:
ifconfig
This reveals your router information. If you have an ethernet connection check out the eth0 bit. If you have a wireless connection check out the wlan0bit. Make a note of the following info:
inet addr – 192.168.1.5 (pi’s IP Address)
Bcast – 192.168.1.255 (broadcast IP range)
Mask – 255.255.255.0 (subnet mask)
then run:
route -n
and note the following:
Gateway Address – 192.168.1.1
then run the following command to edit the network configuration:
sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces
and change the following entry from:
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
to:
iface wlan0 inet static address 192.168.1.5 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 192.168.1.1 network 192.168.1.0 broadcast 192.168.1.255
Press CTRL and X together to save and exit nano editor.
If you reboot your pi now you should have a static address.
Step #3: Setup motion
First you need to use rpi-update to add to your raspbian image the initially-missing UVC support:
sudo apt-get install rpi-update sudo rpi-update
Next you need to upgrade your packages:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Then you can install motion:
sudo apt-get install motion
Now if you run
lsusb
you should see your camera listed as a usb device, like so:
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 046d:0825 Logitech, Inc. Webcam C270
(If not then perhaps your webcam is not compatible with pi)
Next we proceed to configure motion:
sudo nano /etc/motion/motion.conf
This is a configuration file where you get to define parameters such as the port which motion will run on, or actions that will be triggered when movement is detected.
Here’s a list of the parameters you most likely would want to configure:
- daemon: set to ON to start motion as a daemon service when pi boots,
- webcam_localhost: set to OFF so that you can access motion from other computers,
- stream_port: the port for the video stream (default 8081),
- control_localhost: set to OFF to be able to update parameters remotely via the web config interface,
- control_port: the port that you will access the web config interface (default 8080),
- framerate: number of frames per second to be captured by the webcam. Warning: setting above 5 fps will hammer your pi’s performance!
- post_capture: specify the number of frames to be captured after motion has been detected.
You also need to edit the following file if you want to run motion as a daemon service:
sudo nano /etc/default/motion
and set start_motion_daemon to YES:
start_motion_daemon=yes
Then start motion by typing:
sudo service motion start
Wait for about 30 seconds for motion to start and then open the video stream from VLC or a similar program that can show video streams. If you use VLC player go to File>Open Network and enter the IP address of your pi followed by the stream_port, for example: 192.168.1.5:8083
Via - The Medium
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