I have wanted to do something about my home CCTV system for a while. Currently I have two cameras looking at the front and back of the house.
Over the last couple of years these cameras have been plugged into a powerline adaptor to get data from the garage into the house where its recorded on to my main server. The problem is these adaptors are sometimes temperamental and I lose recording and the cameras or powerline adaptor would need to be rebooted.
So I decided to fix what has been a probably minor annoyance. Using an old plastic enclosure (which once held my home automation pi, the Raspberry Pi 3 I reclaimed when I upgraded the kids computer, and a old 320gb hard drive I set to work.
The first problem was the mini network switch had no power adaptor. I had used it elsewhere on another project, but as its 5V I was able to smash it open, chop up a USB cable and solder them together. Voila.
The loose hard drive was an easy problem to solve as I still had the remnants of a USB caddy after I had smashed open some 8tb ones to harvest the drives for my main server.
The CCTV recording software was probably the best part of this project as the software itself is really neat. The software used was MotionEyeOS (found here – https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneyeos/wiki) which you can flash directly to an SD card, from there it’s just setting up.
From a quick calculation, with 2 cameras at 5 frames per second I can store around 40 days of footage. More than enough.
While the recorder itself is in a locked garage with an alarm, you can never be too careful, so as a backup the camera also uploads a picture every 20 seconds to Google drive.
Overall, entire project took about 30 minutes and has been happily recording for the last 2 days. I might even go back and tidy it up a little…
Cuninghame Design 