Home Monitoring with Raspberry Pi and Node.js

Description

The project is designed as a end to end solution for a DIY Home Monitoring & Intruder Alert system. Besides offering a live video stream on any device (web responsive client), it also actively monitors for movement with the help of a PIR sensor.

If an Alarm is triggered, you get a SMS notification on your phone and the snapshots taken during the Alarm time span (customizable - default is 1 minute) are uploaded via FTP to your server.

Activation / Deactivation of the Alarm Mode can be done in 2 ways:

1. from the Web Client user interface
2. with a Button - for convenience reasons: it is faster than connecting from your phone / pc & toggling the Alert Mode checkbox
   • there is a 10 seconds customizable delay which allows you to move out of the PIR sensor range
   • a Led indicates the Alarm Mode enabled/disabled status

In order to avoid false positives from the PIR motion sensor, extra checks were added - a detection counter & detection interval. The Alarm gets triggered when the sensor detects movement 3 times in 5 seconds (both values configurable in code).

Technology

The project was developed using:

• Raspberry Pi - raspbian, brick button & led, Pir sensor
• Node.js - for the main application
• Mjpg_streamer - to generate the video stream
• Shell scripting - for easy application start (interactive & background)
• Htms/Css/Javascript + Bootstrap - the web client

Project components

Hardware

this.Gpio = require('pi-gpio');
this.Hardware = { MotionSensor : 8, Led : 26, Button : 12 };

• Raspberry Pi
  • I used Model B Revision 2 with Raspbian - any model should be Ok, just be careful with the Gpio configuration pin mappings, they can differ
  • Generic USB webcam (compatible with Raspberry Pi & Raspbian)
  • You can find a comprehensive list here http://elinux.org/RPi_USB_Webcams
  • I used a very old 2MP one which seems to work out of the box with the generic drivers
• Led & Button
  
• PIR motion sensor

• The one I used is available here https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13285
• It normally connects to Analog Input (ex. on Arduino); however you can use it with Digital as well if you connect a 10K resistor between VCC & Signal
  
• To make things easier you can purchase this sensor https://www.adafruit.com/products/189 and skip the soldering part (+ this one has configurable sensitivity built-in, so you might be able to skip the one implemented in the code)

Node application

Dependencies

• express: ^4.12.3
• ftp: ^0.3.10
• http-auth: ^2.2.8
• ini: ^1.3.4
• pi-gpio: 0.0.7
• socket.io: ^1.3.5
• twilio: ^2.3.0

The dependencies you install with NPM:

npm install module --save

Generic Application.js

It is the basic application object, defined to be reusable in other projects Contains the basic server code, generic config file read/write operations, generic Init & Execute & Exit methods implementations

Home Monitoring ApplicationHM.js

• config.ini file

  • default video quality & alert mode settings
  • Twilio sms Api Sid, Token, To number, From number
  • Ftp settings

• Authentication (digest http authentication) - defaults are admin & password :)

  • You can change them from the htdigest file (nice helper tool here http://websistent.com/tools/htdigest-generator-tool/ )

  admin:Private:6982db7f1ddc36a0b47b5f8427dc3526
  

• Web Client application

  • Accessible from anywhere via port forwarding
  • Available also on mobile (responsive web client)

• Monitoring - gets video from Mjpg_streamer server and sends it to the connected app clients

• Mjpg_streamer was used as server, but if you prefer another tool like ffmpeg, you can easily replace it because of the loose integration via the start-webcam.sh script

Alarm mode

• Monitoring - via PIR sensor
• Alarm - Sms notification (implemented with the help of Twilio text messaging API - very cool service, offers great Trial account for development
• Alarm - Snapshots upload to server via Ftp

Web Client - responsive

The client application was designed to be accessible on all platforms (pc / tablet / mobile).

Video streaming quality settings

By default the 480p at 25fps is enabled (initial settings are loaded from the config.ini file)

My webcam is a low-end 5+ years old 2mp device, but for those of you with better webcams I also added 720p & 1080p

Video resolutions & fps can be configured from the /static/js/script.js file

	ui.quality480p.change(function(){ ConfigUpdateQuality("640x480",25); });
	ui.quality720p.change(function(){ ConfigUpdateQuality("1280x720",15); });
	ui.quality1080p.change(function(){ ConfigUpdateQuality("1920x1080",5); });	

Alert Mode

• initial state is loaded from the config.ini file
• You can enable/disable monitoring from checkbox button in the UI
• The state of the Alert Mode is shown both in the UI (the checkbox) but also by the LED
• The physical Button can be also used to toggle the Alert Mode
• All state changes are sent to all connected clients
• If an Alarm is triggered, the UI checkbox button background will be changed to Red

Connected Clients

The dropdown shows a list of all connected clients (connection timestamp & IP) that are currently viewing the video stream

Shell Scripts

start-app.sh

• You can start the application in 2 modes:
  • Interactive (for dev / testing): ./start-app.sh
  • Background: ./start-app.sh -background

#!/bin/bash
# application start in interactive or background mode
#arguments:  [-background]

cd /home/pi/Desktop/rpiWorkspace/Node/HomeMonitoring/

if [ "$1" = "-background" ]; then
	sudo nohup node ./App-home-monitoring.js &>log.txt &
else
	sudo node ./App-home-monitoring.js 
fi

start-webcam.sh

• Used by the application to enable/disable video streaming when clients are connected or when an Alarm is triggered by the PIR sensor.

#!/bin/bash
# webcam video stream
# arguments:  [resolution] [port] [fps]

pkill mjpg_streamer

sudo nohup ./mjpg-streamer/mjpg_streamer -i "./mjpg-streamer/input_uvc.so -y -r $1 -f $3 -q 75" -o "./mjpg-streamer/output_http.so -n -p $2" &

Application Execution Session example

TO DO

• Port the application to Windows 10 Iot on Raspberry Pi 2
• Support for uploading snapshots to cloud (OneDrive / Dropbox) when an Alarm is triggered

References

• Raspberry Pi https://www.raspberrypi.org/
• Node - https://nodejs.org/en/
• Mjpg_streamer http://sourceforge.net/projects/mjpg-streamer/
• SMS Api - Twilio - https://www.twilio.com/sms
• Bootstrap http://getbootstrap.com/
• App Webcam Icon - https://www.iconfinder.com/icons/71274/webcam_icon#size=128

Links

• Blog post about project Home Monitoring with Raspberry Pi & Node
• Hackster.io project page
• twitter @orosandrei