Twitter security cam
posted Jun 16th 2008 2:30pm by Juan Aguilarfiled under: digital cameras hacks
It seems that people keep coming up with ingenious things to with Twitter. Reminding you to water your plants is relatively inventive, but for shear practicality, [Shantanu Goel] created a security camera using a webcam, a few freeware apps, and a Twitter account.
To make this work, install Motion on a system running Linux. As its name suggests, Motion is a free motion-detecting application that monitors movement in a webcam’s field of view. Once installed, it should be configured to take a snapshot of the event whenever something moves; with the locate option turned on, it draws a square frame around the area where motion occurred. The program includes http server functionality, so the photos can be viewed from a remote location. When all of that is properly configured, motion can be set to trigger cURL, Wget, or [Goel]’s Perl script to post a message to Twitter about the event. From there the Twitter account can be configured to send text messages to a phone, creating a virtually instant notification of motion sensed by the webcam.
[via Hackszine]
How about taking this one step further? Add a bluetooth dongle to the computer running the webcam. Set it to automatically connect to your cell phone. Whenever the bluetooth is not associated, allow it to run the security cam script. Simple way to differentiate from the user being home and away.
I assume twitter allows you to set a profile private? I would rather not allow someone to see pictures of my home.
Also, isn’t it possible to skip the twitter step altogether, and email pictures/text directly to your phone? Verizon allows you to email (phonenum)@vzw.com and it will be recieved by your phone.
Posted at 2:51 pm on Jun 16th, 2008 by Geekner