MotionEyeOS
A few months ago my neighbour had her car stolen right off of her driveway. I had been thinking about setting up security cameras for my home for a while beforehand, but this prompted me into action (and managed to get the OK from my wife).
There's lots of options when it comes to security cameras. The most popular cameras these days are Google's Nest doorbell and Amazon's Ring. They've got the benefit of being externally accessible so you can check out who's at your door while you're not at home, but at the cost of ownership of the footage. It's been reported that Amazon provides footage from Ring doorbells to police without a warrant. The alternative are more expensive DVR systems with multiple cameras that can be expensive and require more effort to install.
Instead I found the MotionEye project. I find this rides the line of being affordable and easy to install, while still giving you complete control and ownership of the footage that your cameras pick up. It's essentially an OS with an always-on webcam that starts to record whenever it picks up motion. I bought two Raspberry Pi Zeros and set them up with webcams and the image from the project's repository.
It's been a few months now of operation now, so here are some pros and cons of MotionEye:
Pros
- Inexpensive, especially compared to off-the-shelf products with similar features.
- Pretty easy to set up. Someone with less Linux experience might have different mileage.
- You own your footage.
- It can be configured to upload your footage to Google Drive.
Cons
- Occasional issues with the camera not being detected. This might be because one of my cameras is facing out the back deck sliding door, and the motion from the door could jostle it. A restart usually fixes it, but it still means I need to check the site to see if the camera is recording or not to know if I need to restart, so I could miss important events.
- This is more of my issue than MotionEye's, but be careful with which webcams you pick. I grabbed some off of NewEgg that were marketed as night vision cameras, but what they meant was they had an attached light. Because I mount my cameras inside the house looking out the light would cause more problems than they solve. Real night-vision cameras are more involved and more expensive.
Notes
- Here's a good guide to setting up MotionEyeOS on a Raspberry Pi: Raspberry Valley