Library Thief Detector

Tired of asking random strangers to look over your items at the Library? Fear not for the Library Thief Detector is here!

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Inspiration

Most security cameras in school libraries are situated either at the elevator or in the corners of the floor, making it almost impossible to see who stole your item because the cameras only show who goes in and out of the Library floor as there are no cameras at individual seats. This project is to help the welfare of students anywhere they are.

What it does

Our project is similar to a spy camera book. The camera is hidden in the front page and is almost impossible to notice. The idea is that when the thief (or anyone but the user) to the student’s library seat, the PIR sensor detects motion and takes a picture of the individual. This has proven to be more efficient than security cameras at libraries because a thief could take an item and hide it in their bag in the blindspots of the library.

How we built it

We made use of a raspberry pi 4, a PIR sensor and a camera module. We cut out the middle of a book and hid the camera on the front page to make the book less suspicious. When motion is detected, it takes a picture.

Challenges we ran into

At first, we encountered an issue when trying to connect the pi4 without a HDMI cable to a micro USB cable so we improvised with a MacBook Pro charger. With Apple, most apps are incompatible so finding an IP scanner for the raspberry pi was a task. We also ran into errors when setting up the pi such as frustrating comments even after trying every single option on Stack Overflow. The most daunting task was picking a sensor. Our first choice was a tilt sensor but we had to switch to a PIR sensor after a team member almost lost her hand while attempting to solder the tilt sensor just from watching a YouTube video.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We all learnt a lot from this project and became more familiar with Python and Raspbian.

What we learned

We learned how to connect a Picamera and PIR sensor to Raspberry Pi, as well as link Raspberry Pi to Telegram so that the users could receive notifications.

What's next for Library Thief Detector

Integrate a battery pack to make the project portable. Also, laser cut the book instead of using a blade from Walmart to make it more presentable. We could also embed a RFID tag for each item so we could track it if someone stole it.

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