So, now that I’m in Morgantown – my home is too small to comfortably work on side gigs and personal projects – especially now that my family is getting bigger with the baby! I’ve been using the office space I leased out more and more. While exploring video conferencing with Matt last week, I had the thought “wouldn’t it be cool to have a security camera in the office?”. So I did just that, and it’s actually quite easy for Ubuntu linux users.
What you need:
Ubuntu Linux ( I was using 8.04.1 at the time of installation )
one or more USB web cameras
What you can do:
Motion detection – record video/and or frames if there is motion.
Snapshot intervals – take time interval snapshots regardless of motion detection.
Live video IP stream in mjpeg format.
Specify recorded video to be saved in your choice mpeg, avi, flv, swf format.
When motion exists, have frames and videos draw a box around the specific motion for more obvious recognition of subtle movements ( this actually shows the shadow of the janitor near the door around 6 a.m. every morning – I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise! )
Easily send all data to a backup server in a variety of ways – I keep it simple by saving data to my Dropbox directory, a wonderful cross-platform data syncronization and sharing utility.
Steps:
1. Plugin your webcam.
For me, the Logitech QuickCam® Pro 9000 worked right out of the box, and was only 105$.
2. Install Motion – software motion detector, and turn it on.
sudo apt-get install motion
sudo motion
3. Configure Motion
Everything really works out of the box with this – but isn’t quite organized to my liking, and probably not yours either. Global configuration is located inside /etc/motion.conf ( You’ll notice there are multiple threadN.conf files in this directory – which can be used for custom configured individual cameras if you are setting up more than one ).
Note: Be sure to restart the Motion server everytime you make a configuration change.
sudo /etc/init.d/motion restart
Take a look at the files, they are well documented. Below are a few helpful configurations to get your data organized quicker:
#/etc/motion/motion.conf
# Locate and draw a box around the moving object.
locate on
# Draws the timestamp using same options as C function strftime(3)
text_right %Y-%m-%dn%T-%q
# Text is placed in lower left corner
text_left SECURITY CAMERA %t - Office
Organize the filesytem to save data by date, instead of all in one directory.
# File path for snapshots (jpeg or ppm) relative to target_dir
snapshot_filename %Y%m%d/camera-%t/snapshots/hour-%H/camera-%t-%v-%Y%m%d%H%M%S-snapshot
# File path for motion triggered images (jpeg or ppm) relative to target_dir
jpeg_filename %Y%m%d/camera-%t/motions/hour-%H/camera-%t-%v-%Y%m%d%H%M%S-%q-motion
# File path for motion triggered ffmpeg films (mpeg) relative to target_dir
movie_filename %Y%m%d/camera-%t/movies/hour-%H/camera-%t-%v-%Y%m%d%H%M%S-movie
# File path for timelapse mpegs relative to target_dir
timelapse_filename %Y%m%d/camera-%t/timelapses/hour-%H/camera-%t-%Y%m%d-timelapse
4. (Optional) Setup a backup solution
a. Easy solution, get and install Dropbox — instructions on the Dropbox site. Then update your motion.conf to save to your Dropbox directory:
#/etc/motion/motion.conf
...
target_dir /path/to/dropbox/security_camera
...
b. A more granular solution is to take advantage of hooks configurable in motion.conf. Using these, you can create bash scripts to do anything your heart desires ( like trigger a silent alarm on motion detection outside business hours ). Available hooks: on_event_start, on_event_end, on_picture_save, on_motion_detected, on_movie_start, on_movie_end.
If you have wput installed, you can easily upload files to a remote backup server with these hooks:
#motion.conf
...
on_picture_save wput ftp://user@pass@server %f
...
However, this solution is somewhat less secure, as it uses FTP. In a future post I will detail how to secure this up using encrypted transfer and phrase free keys.