A low budget, professional and DIY video surveillance solution
Can you imagine a world without video surveillance? I don’t think so. If you’ve ever walked in the heart of London, you’ve certainly noticed a camera at every corner. You simply can’t ignore there presence, big brother is watching you, anywhere, all the time.
While some people get a safer feeling, others may have concerns regarding there privacy. Personally, I believe that most people don’t know what privacy actually is and that it’s widely misunderstood: what conflicts with your privacy and what not? Because people will get a better understanding, I see a change in mindset, which will make people think about video surveillance in another way. We already see law changing very regularly, because our governments want to get a better grip on privacy and public video recording.
Having the rise of machine learning, and distributed camera networks, we’ll soon have every spot in this world secured. This might look crazy, but this will be reality very soon!
So if you’re reading this post, you’re one of those few who already realises this change. You want to secure your property with a professional video surveillance system, which you can install quickly without spending a lot of money.
A Raspberry Pi Zero and Kerberos.io
In this article I will show you how I’ve installed a professional 50$ video surveillance in just a few minutes. This is how it looks like.
Before installing and configuring the video surveillance software, Kerberos.io, you first need to make sure you have all the hardware in place. So what you need is:
- Raspberry Pi Zero W (with camera case)
- Raspberry Pi Camera
- Power-supply 5V
- Micro SD card
- 360 degrees smartphone holder with magnetic connector.
You can buy the different parts separately, but I prefer to buy them at once e.g. here. With this camera pack, you’ll get almost everything (except a micro SD-card) you need: the Raspberry Pi Zero W, Raspberry Pi Camera, Power Supply and a camera case. The hardest part was to find a decent mount, so you can mount it on walls without the need for making holes. I think this 360 smartphone car holders is great. It’s mounted on a wall with (easy to remove) glue and uses magnets to connect your Raspberry Pi to the mount. It works great!
Video surveillance software
If you’re ready and got all the hardware parts, you can proceed with installing a video surveillance solution on the Raspberry Pi Zero W. I prefer to use Kerberos.io as it’s very easy to install and also has a fancy interface, next to that you also have the ability to purchase there cloud subscription.
I won’t go into detail how you can install Kerberos.io because there documentation website is a better place to get it done.
After installing you’ll be able to browse to the IP address of your Raspberry Pi and view your activity. Have fun!
