This was a fun little project to make. I ended up with a really cool alternative to paying for a monthly cloud server fee to save my motion-detection videos and it's more secure because my data is being sent right from my Raspberry Pi to my Google Drive.
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| And so we begin with this little powerful device. The Raspberry Pi Zero W. |
First we start with a Raspberry Pi. We will need to add a camera, a flashed ISO image on a little SD card and we will add some configuration.
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| This is me in my computer lab with one of my assistants. |
I enlisted the help of one of my cats. This is not advisable. Cats are quite capable of chewing on and short circuiting your equipment. You may need to reorder parts if you follow this step.
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| This is everything exposed while we were doing our initial configuring, installing and troubleshooting. |
Also be mindful of the parts you buy. I bought this recommended camera on Amazon and ended up with a cyberpunk look having circuits and a camera exposed to the elements of my living room. I will rewire this with a new camera that fits the case when I have extra money for additional Raspberry Pi projects.
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| Here is our cyberpunk looking Raspberry Pi camera keeping watch. |
Next I had to download a copy of MotionEyeOS and flash a SD card with the ISO. I used Balena Etcher. All you do is simply download the operating system you will be using and use the GUI which you can log into once you've located your generated IP address. In this case we used MotionEyeOS from github for our operating system. Once we flashed our card with the Raspberry Pi operating system you just modify the configuration files to help it find your router, insert the card and then load everything into the case. I plugged the Raspberry Pi into my LED projecter using the HDMI port to look at everything on a system level and to make sure everything was configured and loading correctly.
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| This is the Raspberry Pi loading up on the LED projector. |
This step of looking at the system with the projector helped me debug my initial and thankfully only big issue. The wpa_supplicant form was not being accepted. You have to be careful. My file's quotation marks were being turned into left back ticks by the text editor and this was causing an issue. Since we are configuring an operating system everything has to be quite exact. I re-uploaded a wpa_supplicant file as follows (see below). I also reformatted the drive as I reinstalled the operating system and configuration file to make sure everything runs cleanly. The system was hanging and I had to cut power which is not ideal. The reformatting step was just a precaution to avoid any issues with everything loading.
The wpa_supplicant.conf file that works for MotionEyeOS on the Raspberry Pi Zero W is as follows:
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country="Your country you are using the device in"
network={
ssid="Your home network"
psk="Your password"
}
Once I got the camera online the next part was to login to the MotionEyeOS portal and finish the additional configurations for the actual motion-detection, video recording, photos and file uploads. I logged into my router to see the assigned IP address for my device and then navigated to the page that was serving the streaming content from my Pi. Here is where this gets fun. I was able to configure the motion detection to give me instant e-mailed alerts when motion is detected. And then I got the camera to send a sequence of snapshots to a Google Drive whenever motion is detected. On top of all of that Google Drive is a free service so the only real one time expenditure was around $80 for the equipment and everything else is free for the life of the equipment.
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| This is a sequence of images recorded by the motion detection system that were then automatically sent to my Google Drive. |
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