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Same here. I have an old HTC One V and an LG Optimus F6 that I paid less than $50 each for. I didn't want to deal with the hassle of selling online for notmuch or finding someplace to drop them off to recycle them, so I re-purposed them as security cameras. They're connected to a WLAN with no internet access and stream to a raspberry pi 1 model b which runs Motion and does some minor processing and stores them on a rotating basis.

I also use the linked IP Webcam app on the phones--it's the least buggy Android IP cam software I tried out. It has its own webserver and has built-in processing so you don't even necessarily need to use Motion.

My office is in the attic (3rd floor) and it's pretty neat being able to see who's at the front door (1st floor) before rushing down. Or before they even ring, with an alert based on motion detection. It would be even nicer to be able to record infrared at night but that's a project for another year. It's much easier to just mount the cameras indoors in a window rather than deal with outside climate and running wires.

For a time I used one of the old phones as an XBMC (now Kodi) remote. I could get over 10 days standby time regularly... which shows how little I actually used XBMC, which is now not at all. But I'm pretty happy with the phones as IP cams--not connected to the internet. Any future uses I come up with for these old, unsupported, riddled-with-security-hole phones are likewise going to be private LAN only.

If you are referring to http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/... with "motion" then no, it doesn't do what I need. I was talking about making a WiFi-connected streaming camera and you're talking about a library for detecting motion -- two entirely different things. You still need a source of video to detect motion in and a device to run that library on in the first place, you know? It doesn't magically work on its own. And besides, a simple PIR attached to a GPIO-port will require a whole effing lot less CPU-power in order to detect motion than doing it in software via that library.

The FOSS program motion works well for this too. I have it set to contact me when it detects movement, along with a few frames of the captured video.

Came here to suggest this. Besides doing a static image, you can also use it as a motion detector so that at night, if there is a break-in, there's a chance of getting a snapshot of the robbers.

Here's a link: http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/...

This looks interesting: https://medium.com/@Cvrsor/how...

Mouse=Input Device=Camera

InputDevice provides data (i2c sensor, temperature sensor, mouse, camera, mic, voltage meter) computer responds to said data stream. It's kinda what they do.

Hell, if you count the optic sensors as primitive cameras you can extend the analogy.

Like I said before, I have no problems on copyrighting code, or patenting a specific way to determine motion in a specific context... but the arbitrary gesture parts are where things get hinky, starting at Claim 11.

The guy who wrote motion was doing the same thing... he was just making it easier for other folks.

http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/...

I didn't have time to read the whole page, but I know for certain that he was operational in 2009 as I was hoping that he would have time to work out the kinks to make things a bit more stable.

My setup:

"Gear Head" USB webcam $15 - $20, and includes LED lights to make sure people notice it.

"motion" for Linux
http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/...

This grabs from a v4l device and does everything you'd need... periodic frame capture, capture when it detects motion past certain thresholds, swf video generation, upload to a remote server. Set it up to push your camera data to an AWS instance (you pay for data out, not data in), and it'll be there when you need it.

Less useful but still useful are command shells. These provide file management mostly. I believe some of them may allow for sending and retrieving email messages

What I'm trying to understand, is how the submitter intends to use the CLI for a program without a shell of some kind. Unless he's talking about programs like Midnight Commander or Norton Commander (for people who really are getting old) by the term "command shells".

All that said, an interesting program is motion -- it lets you use a USB webcam as a motion detector, is scriptable, takes snapshots or movies.

http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/DownloadFiles

There's an app for that, scriptable too:

Motion: http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome

Motion is a program that monitors the video signal from one or more cameras and is able to detect if a significant part of the picture has changed; in other words, it can detect motion.

The program is written in C and is made for the Linux operating system, (using the video4linux interface). Motion is a command line based tool whose output can be either jpeg, ppm fies or mpeg video sequences. Motion is strictly command line driven and can run as a daemon with a rather small footprint

Features: Features: http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/MotionFeatureList

There's an app for that, scriptable too:

Motion: http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome

Motion is a program that monitors the video signal from one or more cameras and is able to detect if a significant part of the picture has changed; in other words, it can detect motion.

The program is written in C and is made for the Linux operating system, (using the video4linux interface). Motion is a command line based tool whose output can be either jpeg, ppm fies or mpeg video sequences. Motion is strictly command line driven and can run as a daemon with a rather small footprint

Features: Features: http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/MotionFeatureList

I posted this anonymously but now I can't find it on the listing here. If this is a repeat from another post (that I cannot find), I apologize. I'm not sure if my thoughts here will be directly in line with what you want, but I wanted to share what I did in case it would help.

To start, ZoneMinder is a project that I have a soft spot for. It's a very complex application that works moderately well than even some brand new proprietary solutions out there today. That said, ZoneMinder has to go through a monumental facelift before I would consider using it again. Last I used it, it would run for a few minutes then just stop recording and populate thousands of errors in my syslog. ZoneMinder has had some recent developer activity with some individuals who are taking it upon themselves to do work on it and patch it accordingly. The problem is, these individuals don't have access to patch the core version in the repos. I wouldn't be surprised if a large update comes out soon or that ZoneMinder gets forked under a different name with all of the updates. Either option is possible. That said, ZM isn't my software of choice at the moment.

Instead, I use Motion. Just a quick disclaimer, Motion is admittedly not for Grandma Edna who never used Linux before. It's something that requires a little bit of setup. It's a daemon, not a GUI. You have to create the directories for each camera feed. You have to adjust all of the parameters you want within the config file. You have to lay down the initial foundation upon which Motion will run on. If you want some insight with getting started, have a look at my YouTube tutorial I set up a few months ago. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwDLkMPLTw0 (take note there's also a Part 2)

Motion works by watching the MJPG stream of your camera and taking snapshots accordingly. Those snapshots can be configured to stay regular JPG's, or you can turn off JPG's all together and have the system stitch them into an avi file and have more of a video-esque playback. Because MJPG isn't that fantastic with compression, it's literally impossible to have a flawless amazingly epic jaw dropping 3000 FPS feed that looks like BluRay quality. MJPG is solid, but it's not something you would want to be running as a traffic cam where every second makes a tremendous difference. The reality is when it comes to surveillance footage, it only takes a single JPG to really capture the face of a crook. MJPG is very well suited for things like that, so running an MJPG setup at 2, 5, 7, 10 FPS, whatever it may be could very well be a home run.

As I said, Motion has no GUI. You may be wondering, but wait, I want to have a montage of all video feeds actively running. You can do that relatively easy, but it'll take a little bit of leg work. Here on the Motion FAQ I posted some ideas as to what you can use to create your own montage. This will be very basic with no additional features, but you'll see all cameras running at once. Likewise, you can click on each feed to see it full screen. I built my own motion.html file and just keep it saved locally and open it in a web browser when I want to have view. I use Method 2, but each one should serve its purpose: http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/FrequentlyAskedQuestions#How_do_I_see_more_than_one_camera_stream_at_a_time_63

I personally run dual streams. I have Motion running at 1 FPS with the MJPG stream of my cameras which saves the JPG's accordingly to the specific directory for that camera... meaning my camera out front will save the JPGs in /media/surveillance/front_cam/snapshots. On top of that, I also run 24/7/365 full time recording, which utilizes the H264 stream of my cameras. Motion does not support H264, so this particular stream is not involving Motion at all. Motion is only dealing with MJPG. My cameras have

Using motion: http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome you can define restricted areas, define amount of change in the field of view to trigger some kind of alarm, define special commands that are triggered when uploading video stream, etc. Quite versatile I'd say.

I'm assuming what you mean is you want to be able to detect motion in a real time feed. You may be able to cook up some voodo with "Motion". http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome Although it may take some modifying because it is meant mainly for usb webcams, etc.

Option 1 : Get a PC and install something like http://www.zoneminder.com/

Option 2 : Even cheaper, since no pc would be needed, would be to buy a number of openwrt-capable routers, plugin a USB camera of whatever brand you want. Run something like http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome on each of them and store images on USB sticks or have them upload the stuff to a remote server..

Problem with option 1 is that the pc itself would probably be stolen if someone broke in.
Option 2 would allow you to hide each router much easier and have images synced between them or uploaded to a remote server.... Also it would not require you to draw network cables for each station but you could just setup a mesh network directly from openwrt. It would also allow for using cheaper USB based cameras instead of expensive network-based cameras..

ZoneMinder or Motion for video with motion detection. Have it record locally, and rsync or email pictures offsite. You can configure an arduino with some IR and magnetic sensors to notify you of activity in the house. Video motion detection is not quite reliable enough yet. Alternativly, some alarms (eg DSC 1616 with PC5400 addon interface) have a serial output. Alarm companies have a long responsetime, and getting a notification on your phone is not much help if you are away from home. Therefore, talk to your neighbours and set up mutal notification via phone or siren.

Combine with motion (details at the bottom of the page) and an Internet connection.

Endless possibilities.

You mean Motion? It's ok for very low-end applications, but it doesn't handle things like motion detectors or alarm sensors, just cameras (and if they're USB, only one camera), and so it lacks the power that a lot of people would want in a security program.

Of course, I use it myself for a security camera, and have actually caught the person I suspected of stealing things from my office with it - having video proof is nice when you need to rat out the boss's pet for being slime.

So many replays, but I can't see the right one. Here is my configuration:

Motherboard: Alix1C (ITX board 500MHz AMD Geode processor, 256MB RAM, Alix1D is currently in production). board has two serial ports, parallel port, several USB ports, LAN, PCI, mPCI, 4 audio ports, keyboard/mice port, 44pin ATa port, and CF card slot, and other...

Power supply: 12V, 1.25A, idle consumption 5W plus 2-3W for HDD (Hitachi 30Gb 2.5" ATA HDD), pluged directly into board. See http://www.pcengines.ch/ for more info. I tested board from -10 to +50 degrees Celsius, works like a charm for two years non-stop now.

One PCI SATA controler, with two 1TB HDD, and 12V 2A + 5V 2A power supply, fanless. HDD's take about 30-35W together (haven't measured it).
I placed all that in one old ITX case, and right now I have replaced original power suppply with two fanless "brickl" PSUs. Case is ventilated with one 120mm fan, running on 5V.

Ubuntu LTS is installed, running services: Teamspeak, ftp, www, mysql (for WIKI and other things), DC hub (for local network), DC client, Open2300 meteo station software (see http://www.pljusak.hr/ and http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Open2300/WebHome ), samba, and some others.
I was just reassembling it yesterday... ( http://www.vallisaurea.net/staro/webcam/S5004006.JPG and http://www.vallisaurea.net/staro/webcam/S5004008.JPG )

Yep - also wonder if the underlying code shares some of the Motion Source which is what Duncan used to catch the perp.

motion.

http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/

feature list:

http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/MotionFeatureList

You could have it trigger an external program to get that "one big button set at the factory" effect merely by walking into the kitchen.

motion.

http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/

feature list:

http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/MotionFeatureList

You could have it trigger an external program to get that "one big button set at the factory" effect merely by walking into the kitchen.

Put Linux on one, plug in a webcam, and use Motion to turn it into a motion-sensing security camera.

There is a Linux program called 'motion' that works pretty good. http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome

The motion software is also a good choice for recording a network camera. There's a review of a cheap camera at benstechcents blog and it has some good tips for cheap cameras. Good camera placement is far more important that high res video, and more cameras can increase the chance of catching the identifying moments that you want later.

As far as software goes, on the Linux side is a program called motion. It's a command line app which makes it pretty simple to ensure it's running on bootup (nice if the power goes out and comes back). Connect a webcam, and it takes snapshots at an interval you select whenever it detects motion (can also do movies).

I have this running on an old P3 600 mhz laptop in my studio. I don't live at the studio but a number of cats adopted it as their home. I point the camera at the cat door and that allows me to know which cats have been around as they must come inside to eat. It used to be that I'd worry when I didn't see a cat for days -- now I just check my pics and usually see that truant stopping by at 3:00 a.m. for a late night snack. The whole setup cost nothing -- just repurposing stuff from its prior roll of "filling closet space due to obsolescence" to doing something useful.

I have one of those too. Axis cameras are good for the price. I also use Linksys WVC200s, which are good pan/tilt/zoom cameras for around AU$350. A real cheapie is XNET's NTC101W Wireless IPCamera for around AU$200. The XNETs are low quality, but good for motion detection, which is then used to trigger the Axis.

I mainly use Motion on the software side, along with a couple of shell scripts. At the moment, it's all custom stuff, and my personal setup runs on a MythTV/Samba fileserving box. I've been looking at putting it all together in a live CD distro if I get time.

Not counting the Linux box, which is doing multiple duty, I put together a pretty good home security package for less than AU$1500, most of which was the Axis (at AU$600).

I used to use Motion. I had it setup for surveillance of my home office. It used just a plain USB webcam, and would only record when it detected movement. I managed to configure it to turn on when my screensaver turned on, and turn off when I logged back into the computer. If it detected movement, it would email the resulting video to a gmail account. Worked really well, except that it burnt out two Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000's (I don't think they like being left on for long periods of time). Haven't really found a good webcam for linux since so I never set it back up again (not that I looked that hard). If anybody has a recommendation for a good linux webcam that has a reasonably wide angle lens and decent low light response then please share.

There's an open-source webcam software called Motion that is fully customizable, and has built in motion triggering, streaming web-server, pan/tilt (if you have an orbit webcam or similar), creation of time-lapse video, and tons of features and plug-ins:

http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHom e

I have just set up a Debian GNU/Linux based DVR system on commodity hardware for a London based construction firm. This was just one machine with eight inputs nowhere near the scale you are working with, however my experiences may be of interest. I used one of the clients existing Pentium 3 fileservers and standard video cameras connected to two IEI IVC-200 capture cards. The base system is Debian testing running motion and apache2.

Some of the replies you have here suggest Zoneminder is suited to a production environment, this is not my experience. Zoneminder is difficult to install, unreliable and over complicated. I'm sure in time the project will mature, however I could not recommend it at this time. Motion offers less functionality but is much easier to install and is reliable. You will have to write you own start and stop scripts as well as web pages to display pictures and video. You will also need to write scripts to periodically archive any video saved on hard disk. None of this should present any problems for a good GNU/Linux administrator. As you seem to have a large number of similar systems you would only need to write one set of scripts and replicate them on each system.

If I were in your situation I would try and use as much of your existing hardware as possible. I assume that you are running a single machine at a variety of remote sites. From a cursory look at the Pelco site the systems you have are standard hardware, and should run GNU/Linux fine. You may find that the capture cards that Pelco provide are not supported so you may need to replace these. If most of your hardware is the same then you can configure just one machine and replicate this on the other machines. Motion supports differing camera resolutions, video/still capture and motion sensing. The motion homepage is at http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHom e. If you need strong security GNU/Linux provides you with many options. You can easily verify the suitability of this approach at low cost on a small scale.

If you need any further help contact the company I work for Sirius IT http://www.siriusit.co.uk/. Sirius has good contacts with the free software community and may be able to provide further help.

Steve

How about motion?

http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHom e

i'm not sure it does everything you want it to, but ive used it before and thought it was very cool (i was using it out of interest, not for real security cameras)

I set up a system for a building contractor where they were being raided every once in a while. I used SBC's and webcams that save the video over the network to a server, all linux, ports configurable to whatever you desire.
The only "extra" software I used was motion, which is easily installable on a debian GNU/Linux box (and probably others as well).

Have a look at this article. It describes how to use the motion program (home page).

I use motion http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHom e, an application which detects motion within your camera's field of vision and then either takes still images or moving video captures of the scene. Great for paranoid security or annoying your roomate.

How funny, I'm working on this today.

I use a weather station made by La Crosse.

The station measures temperature, rain, humidity, wind speed and even calculates the dew point. It also functions as an atomic clock receiver.

The sensors are outside, and connect to a base station inside the house through a wired or wireless (433 MHz) connection. The base station connects to a PC over a serial connection. The sensors are battery powered. Mine have been running for 6 months off of NiMH batteries.

The stations come with software for Windows, but you can also use connect via Linux using the Open2300 project.

2300 includes most everything you need: The C programs read from the device via a serial port and write the information to a flat file or to an optional MySQL database.

Using a set of PHP scripts, you can host the data on any Apache webserver. As an alternative, you can upload the data to Weather Underground, or even broadcast it over a HAM radio (Citizens Weather-- but I know nothing about this).

The weather stations also listens to the NIST Atomic Clock in Boulder, Colorado. I'm looking at ways of using my weather station to set the time for my NTP service.

It's all pretty straightforward, and requires very little technical knowledge if you use the vendor-supplied versions of MySQL, PHP (With GD) & Apache.

My station for Berkeley has been setup for a month, but I need to remount the temperature sensors to a location that doesn't collect as much heat. It's not really 85F in Berkeley right now-- it's 85F right outside the office door, and a cool 80F inside.

You might want to have a look at Motion. It is an application written for GNU/Linux that can capture video from several sources, has builtin motion detection (hence its name), can execute commands when motion is detected and a has lot more features.

I used to use a linux program called "motion" at a lab I worked at - it could do all the usual features - record only when a scene changed by a certain amount, time-lapse, ignore certain areas etc. It converted them to a series of movies for each "incident" recorded, plus a daily time-lapse one.

Looks like he used motion and some handmade scripts.

http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHom e

I used to do this exact same thing (but after having the house broken into once first)

I think it was around 1998 when I first started using motion, still do. Have set it up in a few office spaces for non-profits.

Not trolling, but this is not new.

I don't have much experience with ZoneMinder, but I did set up a similar software package called motion which not only has the ability to define zones, but also has built in noise reduction technology, and several other nifty features, including only triggering after a certain minimum number of frames and massive change filtering (such as when your AGC keeps drastically changing the image).

I have motion set up to watch my front yard, and I am very pleased with it's lack of false detections *without* having to set up zones.

I don't have much experience with ZoneMinder, but I did set up a similar software package called motion which not only has the ability to define zones, but also has built in noise reduction technology, and several other nifty features, including only triggering after a certain minimum number of frames and massive change filtering (such as when your AGC keeps drastically changing the image).

I have motion set up to watch my front yard, and I am very pleased with it's lack of false detections *without* having to set up zones.