Make Security Cameras With motionEyeOS
YOU’LL NEED THIS
A SINGLE-BOARD COMPUTER
Compatible camera(s). A microSD card.
MOTIONEYEOS
GIVE A PERSON A CAMERA, and they’ll find a way to point it at other people. Most of the singleboard computers that are popular at the moment have camera attachments, or can use a webcam through a USB port. MotionEyeOS is an operating system that does nothing but operate cameras, and it can be installed on a great many of these boards—we’re using a Raspberry Pi Zero W, but Banana Pi, NanoPi, ODROID, and Pine boards are all compatible.
MotionEyeOS is a lightweight way to run motionEye, the web interface that gathers together the feeds from connected cameras and displays them, running motion-detection routines and triggering recordings or stills when motion is detected. It can take feeds from connected cameras or network cameras, and multiple boards can work together as individual cameras or hubs.
The whole thing is the work of Calin Crisan, a developer who has also taken the time to write a wiki detailing the installation and usage of the OS on its Github page. There’s a lot more going on than we can cover in this simple tutorial, so if you want to make a complex surveillance system relatively cheaply, this might be a good way of going about it.
–IAN EVENDEN
© RASPBERRY PI FOUNDATION
1SET UP YOUR HARDWARE
We’re using a 16GB microSD for this, but any capacity will do. Download the motionEyeOS from https://github.com/ ccrisan/motioneyeos/wiki, https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/. and the Raspberry Pi Imager from Install the app on a Windows PC (or a Mac, or Ubuntu) and use it to install the OS from its ISO to your SD card [Image A]. To get the Pi to connect to your network, you have a choice: You can connect a USB-to-Ethernet adapter via the microUSB port and connect it to a wired network, or you can preload it with your Wi-Fi details. When it’s finished, pop the card out, then put it back in again—in Windows, you’ll probably get an error saying your card needs to be formatted, but don’t press “OK”—the FAT32 partition will mount and be readable. Open this from This PC, and use something like Notepad++ (Windows’s built-in Notepad doesn’t format the lines correctly) to create a new text file in the root directory with the name “wpa_supplicant.conf”—remove any .txt extensions. This information enables the Pi Zero to connect to your Wi-Fi. The content of the plain text file should be this: