Anyone install a USB Webcam as a Security Camera?

Hardware
1

Curious if anyone was successful. I tried a few weeks ago and completely fried my SD card and messed up.

Thinking of trying again this weekend.

Goals:

  1. Show live stream or show updated image every 10 seconds on HA.
  2. Save picture/videos when motion is sensed when I am not home.
  3. Pictures/videos uploaded to some cloud server - I have a server, just need to FTP it.
  4. CRON job to delete pictures on a periodic basis for space.

This is what I tried before:

2

I’m using a couple of Raspberry Pi’s & cameras with this software https://www.facebook.com/motioneyeos/

Works well, but lacks night vision.

Calvin

1 Like
3

I am using Blue Iris, I have a combination of USB and wifi cameras, it should do everything on your list.

4

Blue Iris looks interesting, however being the community that we are does anyone know a similar open source package? :slight_smile:

5

This blog post covers an alternative way. The post was sitting around a while but this thread encouraged me to publish it.

2 Likes
6

Thank you - similar path I took maybe i’ll give it another try!

7

I do it all the time with motion. Its quite powerful if you just take a few min to look at the config.

8

Zoneminder is also great. No need for any software listed above.

9

For my side,

I setup my PS3 motionEye camera with motion.
Motion detection is active.

Now i want to compare date from lastsnap taken by camera.

My goal is the following

  • each motion replace my pic /tmp/lastsnap
  • An automation runs each minute
  • it compares the date of the pics (between the object in Home Assistant and now) or by script
  • if pic is newer than 1 minute AND nobody is home
  • I notify my phone with pushbullet (with pic in attachement)

We could also shutdown light if no motion is detected …

but how to compare that ? with relative_time(timestamp) ?

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I success that but without HA :frowning:
I proceed like that

a shell called cameranotify.sh

#!/bin/sh find /tmp -name "lastsnap_motion.jpg" -mmin -1 > /tmp/motion_age.txt if test -s /tmp/motion_age.txt then /usr/bin/python3.4 /home/pi/.homeassistant/scripts/cameranotify.py fi

The python from Attach photo in notification

And a crontab which runs the shell script each minute …
If the pic is newer than 1 minute, execute the python script.

problem HA is not aware about that …

2 Likes
11

A feedback on it

I add an input_select called alarm with 3 options week, weekend and off
for each option i replace my crontab to notify me or not during work hours for example.

So i add too on my presence detection, the replacement of my crontab to stop to notify me at home :slight_smile:

it works very well.

Now i think about an ultimate solution based on openCV and face recognization, i don’t know this product, but it seems to be easy to setup.

a Netamo welcome for free :wink:

anyone know that ?

12

I am not familiar with Netamo, can you chat? Join me on slack in the jasper-project if you dont mind. I would like to share/ask questions.

All info/links here:
jasper-project-useful-links

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Hi Mattcurrycom,

Netatmo welcome is a camera which is able to identify family.
send pics to parents when children arrive at home for example.

I looked your blog ;p
i think NAOMI could do that :slight_smile: