Raspberry Pi Project Part 1

I have been dabbling in raspberry pi’s lately and they are really quite fascinating. Such a small form factor but can do traditional computing tasks and computing on the edge. I was gifted a Raspberry Pi 4 a few years ago and only recently used it for something other than collecting dust. Now, its a valiant network-wide ad-blocker with its very own dashboard (shoutout to the folks at Adguard)! I wanted to do something a bit more low-level like with real wires and moving parts.

Recently, my partner has been complaining that our indoor camera has been lacking in quality/motion detection capabilities, not to mention, it requires a $100 subscription to store the recordings! A switch flicked in my head and I thought, “Why don’t I try to make an indoor camera because I already have a NAS (network attached storage) to store my own recordings, and I could just program a bash script to clean the storage every few months or so…” From there, it was a simple as making a grocery list of things I needed:

• indenpendent PCB for the brains of the camera
• an actual camera
• protective case so its not all out in the open

I chose the Raspberry Pi 02w because of its small form factor and this impressive compute for my PCB and the Raspberry Pi Ai Camera because of its bulilt-in models for object recognition. Below is a snapshot from the real headless setup.

In terms of cost, the 02w was about $50 for all necessary parts which includes shipping and I picked up the camera for $80 at my local tech shop, so not very cheap. Maybe I went a bit overboard, but I really wanted this to be something that could replace the home security system.

Stay tuned for part 2!