Home Hacking Projects for Geeks

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Part I: Home Automation

because the webcam software just dropped the pictures into a folder. I used

Windows 2000’s Internet Information Server’s directory-browsing capabil-

ity to view the list of pictures from a browser, but this was slow because it

didn’t display thumbnails.

Clearly, it’s time for something better. This time around, I’m going to set up

a Sammy-monitoring system that can do the following things:

• Take pictures in three locations: the cat’s food bowls, the cat’s favorite

window, and the cat’s litter box.

• Take pictures only when there really is motion. No more false alarms.

• Turn lights on when necessary so the camera has adequate light to take

a picture.

• Don’t take pictures when it’s too dark.

• Automatically process pictures to improve image quality.

• Allow me to browse thumbnails of the pictures from an Internet café.

Figure 3-1. The conceptual design is

simple, but the execution will be complex.

And of course, it needs to be cheap. Figure 3-1 shows

this project’s conceptual architecture. As you can see,

the pet triggers the motion detector, which sends a sig-

nal to your computer, which in turn will take a snapshot

through the remote camera nearest the pet. Then, the

picture will be timestamped and saved to a Web page,

where you can view it anywhere in the world.

Project Overview

This project builds on the preceding projects by ...