I’ve decided to embark on a video surveillance project! My family lives in a very rural part of the US, and constantly hear and see evidence of animals going crazy outside of my home at night. The goal of this project is to hopefully provide some kind of insight as to what animals actually live in my backyard.

Ideally, I want to monitor the yard using some kind if infrared motion detector. Upon a motion detection, an IR camera assisted by some IR spotlights would begin filming until it has been determined that there isn’t any more movement going on in yard. These clips would then be filed into a directory, and at the end of the night, they would be compiled and uploaded to YouTube. This video would then be sent to the user via email.

I’ve created the following flowchart to develop against as I begin implementing this idea.

I’ll be using a Raspberry Pi to implement this idea, a few months back I bought the IR camera module and haven’t used it for anything, this would be a good project to test it out.

There are a few hurtles that I’ll have to cross in order to make this project a success, like most groups of problems I deal with, they can be separated into hardware and software components.

Hardware

1. Minimize false positives by strategically arranging motion detectors
2. Make sure IR Spotlights are powerful enough to illuminate area
3. Enclosure must be weatherproof & blend in with environment, Maine winters are brutal.

Software

1. The Pi doesn’t have any built in software to take undetermined lengths of video.
2. Must have a lot of error catching and other good OO concepts in order to ensure a long runtime.

I’ve actually come up with a routine for solving the first software problem I’ve listed, hopefully I’ll have an example of my solution in action later tonight.

Ideally, this project will have a working implementation completed by May 21, which is 7 days from now.