Little Brother

Inspiration

We were inspired to make a non-intrusive, not scary, open source, and simple home-monitoring solution, that we knew how it worked. No smoke and mirrors. No man behind the curtain.

• It’s important to know what is going on in the devices you use every day, privacy is becoming a growing concern as technology companies become more ingrained in our lives.
• Taking control of your data is really important, so we wanted to offer an alternative to products like Amazon Ring and Google Home Nest.

We also wanted to create discussion about the upcycling of old electronics. Electronic waste is a huge problem in the world that needs huge amounts of legislation to remedy, but taking steps to make sure we can re-use old electronics is really important. Re-use your old phones and electronics for cool projects like ours!

What it does

Using an IP camera, it will piece together a video containing clips of the people detected by the camera. Using this, it saves storage space when the video is dumped. It will also email images of the people who come by the camera to your email (which is editable in config.yml).

How we built it

Over Saturday, in Python, using YAML as configuration, and an old LG G6.

Challenges we ran into

We found using the DroidCam app sometimes posed a challenge. There were some inconsistencies in the way that the app is run on different devices: some devices displayed a timestamp where others didn’t, some devices required an https prefix when calling for the video capture and some required http. We also experienced some glitches and loss of frames when using the app over extended periods of time. Our biggest challenge was finding the cause of the errors, and then we were able to implement solutions to these issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Learning OpenCV
• Utilizing multiprocessing library to parallelize operation & minimize frame loss

What we learned

• OpenCV.
• Motion detection algorithms, various approaches

What's next for Little Brother

We plan on fine-tuning Little Brother to be something we can use every day. Package theft is quite common in Hamilton, and this is something we’d like to help mitigate.

• Employing it for use at our student house.
• More optimizations - slow motion playback issue (no frames are lost, but it plays slowly)
• Implementing analog sensors using Arduino, communicating with little-brother client using serial to add more contextual awareness to our system.

Built With

• opencv
• python
• yaml