Building a Home Security Camera Using Raspberry Pi

The multifaceted Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer, about the size of a credit card. Initially meant as an education tool to teach kids the craft of programming, it quickly became the fad among adults to build crazy devices. With the right kits, you can turn it into your very own printer system, Minecraft server, TV background light, talking plush toy, intelligent robot, e-health platform or even home security system. That’s right; you can even build a home security system with a camera from it.

Building your own security camera

Even though the setup is well fleshed-out in this tutorial, we recommend it only to those who are at least a bit familiar with Raspberry Pi or tinkering with hardware in general. First of all, you need a Raspberry Pi motherboard, this is a given. Then connect a R. Pi camera or a USB camera, since the board has a USB port built into it. You should also get a Micro SD card to store the live footage, a power supply, and an Ethernet cable. Raspberry Pi is capable of handling Wi-Fi connections as well, so the LAN cable isn’t mandatory if a router connection is available. There is a good reason behind the need for internet access: put together the parts correctly, and the device will stream live video footage to your browser. In this sense, the Raspberry Pi camera doesn’t differ much from a high-class camera sold by home alarm companies.

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