Starting my first work from home job was an interesting change from the cubical world. The refrigerator was always in eye sight, Starbucks was just across the street, and I had no coworkers around me to bounce ideas off of. My apartment’s front door was right next to my desk and being the busy hallway that it was I was constantly hearing other residents pass by. Unsure if they were for me or just heading to the elevators I built a device to expand on the peep hole allowing me to see who was at my door from anywhere in my unit.
I already had a Raspberry Pi and camera that I was first using for some time-lapse videos of my 3d printer builds but I decided to repurpose those in this project. Looking online I found a script on GitHub that both implemented the Raspberry Pi’s built in camera features to detect movement (for future updates) and to display the cameras view to the Pi’s HDMI output.
With the coding complete it was time to move on to the mounting hardware. Searching online I found 3d models that I could use for both the Rapsberry Pi and for the camera sensor to mount to the front door. Based on how I planned to mount the camera the mount’s hinges were on the wrong side of the model based on other features so the model was put into a 3d modeling program and the hinges moved to the other side.
The final step was mounting everything to the door. The Pi and Camera were attached using 3m command strips. An old TV was placed in an out of the way spot next to the door and plugged up to the Pi.
Future iterations of this project would turn this into a multi camera setup using the new, smaller, Raspberry Pi W[ireless] and an open source motionEyeOS Linux distro that greatly expands on the features and allows for multi camera setups.