BUILD YOUR OWN RASPBERRY PI HOME SECURITY SYSTEM
Font door cameras are a great way to check up on couriers and potential intruders alike, and there are plenty of affordable plug-and-play systems to choose from, such as Amazon’s Ring. However, there’s a catch with such prebuilt solutions: privacy. No matter who you buy from, you’re trusting a third party with imagery from your home. Even if they mean well, a security breach could expose your data or log the face of everyone who comes to your door.
Building your own camera system ensures you maintain total control over what’s going on – and it’s easier and cheaper than you might expect. On these pages, we’ll show how you can create your own home surveillance system using cheap Raspberry Pi hardware.
WHAT YOU’LL NEED
You can use any model of the Raspberry Pi for this project, but the Pi Zero WH is ideally suited. At around £13, it’s very cheap yet has built-in wireless networking and Bluetooth, along with the necessary GPIO pins to connect the camera module. You could use the even cheaper Zero W, which costs just £9, but you’ll need to add the GPIO pins: you can either buy a standard header and solder it on yourself or acquire a solder-free hammer-in kit.
As always, you’ll also need a microSD card to hold the Raspberry Pi OS and software. We find 16GB is a good capacity for Pi projects, as the cards are inexpensive while still affording a decent amount of space: you can get a three-pack from Amazon for £14. In this case, you could even get away with a smaller card because we don’t plan to store our captured images on the Pi. Rather, we’ll upload them to a server via FTP; this not only saves space, but it also allows us to check the images from anywhere, which is vital for monitoring activity while you’re away from home.
The next thing you need is a camera. There are three official Raspberry Pi cameras to choose from: the best is the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera, but this comes as a bare 12.3MP sensor device to which you’ll need to add a lens, which adds
