The Baby Cam Project
Contents
What a month this has been! My second son was born 35 days ago, he’s a super cute little dude who goes by the name of “Sam”, he enjoys long walks in the park, breast milk, diaper changes and preventing mommy and daddy from having any sleep (God forbids!).
Introduction
Time flies when you’re tired (like, really tired. Always), baby Sam is now a month old and we need to get a baby monitor soon, there are a couple interesting options out there (like the Withings Baby Monitor) which provides 2-way WiFi connection, night vision and some other goodies but they’re kind of pricey and to be honest, not that impressive from the technological point of view, I think you can build a far superior monitoring system with two thirds of the money using a Raspberry Pi paired with an Arduino Board to interface with light, movement and other sensors. The great thing about this combo is that not only you’ll get all the raw data coming from the sensors at hand, but you would also have a “capable” (Notice the quote marks) platform to process the video before streaming it wirelessly, this opens a world of possibilities! (cough, cough Eurelian Video Magnification).
This will be a long series of posts documenting the journey of a geek parent building the ultimate baby monitoring gadget / tracker money can’t buy, this post will be constantly updated with the latest developments of the BabyCam so make sure to come back every now and then to check what’s new!
Phase One: Research & Experimentation
Before going crazy and getting all the hardware from Amazon (God knows I’m eager to!) it’s a good idea to nail the basics down, let’s play around with image and video processing locally and make sure the Pi can actually take it.
- Installing OpenCV on Mac OS X Mavericks.
- Accessing a Webcam Stream Programmatically
- Having Fun with Face Tracking