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Home Made Alarm Systems?
screwBrinks! asks: "I would like to begin a new project to do during those long and boring weekends. I thought about creating an alarm system in my apartment which would be connected to my computer. Then, if there is any intrusion, it would page me or phone me. I also want to be able to see a live report from the web and some other goodies. I have no problem doing the software part, but I don't have much experience with building hardware. Have any of you ever built such a system? If so, what would be your recommendation? I know much of this may already exist prebuilt, but I really would like to make as much of it as I can, for fun. I have no problem against using prebuilt infrared detectors, prebuilt door contacts, and the like as long as they aren't X-10 products."
I work for Ericsson Research in Singapore. One of the projects we recently did was a security camera that sent pictures of the intruder to your phone (in many countries, including the US, it is illegal to program a machine to call the police directly).
The camera/computer part was standard Linux with the capture/compare/MPEG software mentioned in the other posts. The phone part used MMS, or Multimedia Messaging Service, a new feature in the Sony-Ericsson T68 phones (MMS is like SMS+PowerPoint).
It's a pretty neat idea. If you're interested in the details, send me a message and I will forward to the guy in our office who hacked this stuff together.
// Alan Porter