Home Hacking Projects for Geeks

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Chapter 13, Build a Security System, builds a real-time alerting system for

your home. But what do you do when you actually receive an alarm? If

you’re at work and you get a message from your security system that a win-

dow was opened, it would be very nice if you could just take a look at that

window before you rushed out to your car and drove home, especially since

you’ll probably discover that your cat knocked the alarm out of place.

This project provides you with a way to visually inspect your house from

across the network using real-time video. Sure, everyone has a webcam,

but this project is a bit different. We’ll be monitoring several places around

your home, so we’ll need multiple cameras as well as the ability to switch

between them. Since the cameras will be spread around the home, we can’t

rely on directly connecting the cameras to the computer. We’ll need to

find a way to get the video from the camera back to the computer that will

stream it across the Internet.

If you’re a webcam geek, you’ll find this project interesting. The end result is

a multi-camera system, where a user can click links on a web page to switch

between the cameras. You can add as many as eight different cameras, so you

could probably have one in each room of your home.

What You Need

• Three or more wireless cameras

• Wireless video receiver (compatible ...