Building a Garden Surveillance Camera

[mmkstarr31420]

Hi! I wish to build a "surveillance camera", or just a camera, for our rear yard, which may either be triggered by motion (moving animals) or just always on, or on optionally at night or during the day to monitor the movement and growth of our garden! I think this is a really cool idea, so obviously Raspberry Pi will be able to handle it. I would also be interested in constructing time-lapse videos down the line so any guidance on tutorials for this would be hugely appreciated.

I am starting off at https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneyeos/ ... stallation and thinking of appropriating the security camera software. It's not fit-for-purpose, but it might be the closest thing out there? I haven't done too much digging yet. If anyone knows of anyone else who has done this already feel free to let me know!

The problem I have with motioneyeos is that it is an OS, and I would like to maintain Raspbian on the Pi (so, dual boot). I'm not familiar with how to adjust disk partitions on the Pi to allow for dual booting. Are there any guides out there you recommend on how to do this? I used linux in grad school briefly and remember it was really simple to do on a laptop.

Thank you for your time!

[Gavinmc42]

Try Pikrellcam, I use it with Raspbian Lite so it should work with the full version.

[alphanumeric]

One option is to just swap Micro SD cards. One with full Raspbian and one with Motion Eye.

I have 4 cameras setup with Motion Eye. I'm not currently using the motion part though. I found it a bit finicky to set up. I was trying to take some stills of birds at my feeder. I either got no pictures or hundreds of stills. I eventually just gave up using the motion and did manual snaps. Most of my cameras just stream to a web browser on my PC. If I want to record a video I do it manually. No night vision just the normal V2 Pi foundation cameras. Mine are Pi 3A+'s and 3B's. I tried to use a Zero W but it just wasn't up to the task of streaming the video and any decent frame rate.

[peppe8o]

Hi,
Motioneye has Motion detection features (use Advanced View on settings section) and should work also on Raspbian, but another (very simple) option is using the power of Docker (containers). This solution uses Raspbian (I suggest Stretch lite because I already tested it and is working) as OS. Then you have to install Docker (also this step is very simple and can be achieved with a single command). Then containers work like virtual machines and your favorite OS is still available to you. At this point you can setup the Motioneye container (with some simple mappings for RPI camera interfacing). You can find the complete guide at the following page: https://peppe8o.com/2019/02/raspberry-p ... ce-system/

[mmkstarr31420]

Thanks, both.

I think I will opt with PiKrellCam, as it is built-for-purpose for my personal project already. MotionEye would be an extension or advanced feature, which seems a bit tangential to the cause. I think it has everything I need. It already triggers motion capture videos upon motion detect automatically and the install is super-simple. No OS repartitioning required.

Does anyone know how to capture timelapses of garden growth or would this be a separate topic? I would like to do this as well, but I wonder if more than one camera app can run at the same time or would ownership of the camera object be exclusive to PKC?

[Gavinmc42]

Pikrellcam can run scripted.
Try a search of all those pages?
In the notes there is ways to do things at certain times.
I have used that for backing up, might be able to use it for timelapse.

[mmkstarr31420]

Awesome! I got it installed and it ran fine the first time. The camera hasn't arrived yet (should by tomorrow). After closing the window and re-opening to <http://raspberrypi>, it gave a 504 gateway timeout error. I think this may be because there is no camera yet, so I will try again with it installed tomorrow.

Ineed, in the software itself, the GUI has a "Timelapse" button, which probably does what I want it to do.

Thanks for the great software recommendation!

[joan]

I tried to use motion software for a garden cam but there were far too many false alarms (vegetation in the wind, rain, slugs etc).

In the end I just recorded the whole lot in 15 minute segments. I then post processed the segments to create a new video of every 45th frame, so each segment ended up as 20 seconds. I then view those each day.

I record 6 evening to 6 morning for 48 clips. They take me 20 minutes to eyeball. I then discard all the rubbish and process the little left over (I'm mainly interested in foxes, most else I ignore).