This weekend I’ve been setting up my latest Raspberry Pi (a version III, in a blue lego case, running Ubuntu) to display a video stream of what’s going on outside my house so I can watch out for deliveries etc.
It’s something I’ve done before on different hardware, but I thought it was worth documenting as it’s a good project for any model of Raspberry Pi, and requires nothing more than the Pi, a USB webcam (or camera module), and 15 minutes of your time. I’m using a piece of software called motion which is available in the Debian/Raspian/Ubuntu repositories.
Install motion:
sudo apt-get install motion
Enable motion to start at boot:
sudo nano /etc/default/motion
Find the line that says start_motion_daemon=no and change it to start_motion_daemon=yes.
Enable the stream to be viewed from other computers on the local network, and also make the output a little bigger:
sudo nano /etc/motion/motion.conf
Change the following values:
daemon on
width 640
height 480
framerate 100
stream_localhost off
Reboot, and then browse to port 8081 on the computer you’ve set it up on.