motioncam

A simple, adaptable web-connected camera, using the ESP8266, Arducam, and optionally a motion sensor and some server-side bits for archiving.

Perhaps a good base for more elaborate projects.

Overview

This collection of software lets you set up ad-hoc camera thingies.

It presents a web-based view of your Arducam-based camera and optionally uploads camera frames to an Internet server when it detects motion.

Hardware

ESP8266 board. I used a Wemos D1 Mini but this should work on any board with some adaptations. Here's one on Amazon. They're cheaper directly from Aliexpress.

ArduCAM 2mp (5mp would work with minor changes). Available on Amazon.

Optional: HC-SR501 motion sensor

Wiring

For Arducam this wiring seemed to work for me. You may have a different experience.

Arducam Pin	ESP8266 pin	Notes
CS	D3	Didn't seem to work on D8
Mosi	D7
Miso	D6
SCK	D5
GND	GND
VCC	3V3
SDA	D2
SCL	D1

If you want to use an HC-SR501 as well, attach these. The pin I selected is arbitrary so feel free to use others. Carefully press on the edge of the white dome on the motion detector to release it so you can see which pin is which.

HC-SR501 Pin	ESP8266 pin
VCC	5V
GND	GND
OUT	D0

Software

Warning: this thing posts to my public server by default; be sure to edit all the host details in both configuration sections.

esp8266/ is the software to install on the ESP8266/camera device. The device can be configured to join an existing wifi network or to start its own. Either way it presents a streaming view of the camera frames on its own IP. See the configuration section at top of the motioncam.ino file to configure its behavior. This is mostly garbage that's been cut-n-pasted from here and there.

server/ contains the optional server-side part. It will record a burst of frames when motion is detected by the device. See CONFIG.sh to customize its behavior.

server/postserver-bash/ receives frames from camera device(s) and stores them. It's a Bash one-liner basically. Uses netcat which must be installed as nc.

This should be updated to HTTP at some point, but I had encoding issues with the client-side Arduino HTTP libraries when doing POST with image data, and I'm pretty sure TCP/IP is 8bit clean anyway.

Eventually it should accept data other than images (such as sensor measurements), allow senders to indicate their node id, and restrict upload access to configured users/keys, but right now it doesn't do any of that. Assumes you have ImageMagick installed on the server as convert but you could easily remove that. Run with sh run.sh.

server/webviewer-node/ allows you to review stored frames. It's a crude Node.js web server using Express and the static file stuff. It uses HTTP AUTH and the list of users can be configured in users.txt. The password is always ignored. Don't forget to npm install and then sh run.sh. Ideally, this would share some sort of visual language with the Esp8266-side server.

Status

Prototype as usual..

Credits

@tlack

Built at Building.co in Miami