Goal
The goal is to use your webcam to monitor activity in your room (or wherever you want to point it to), but with a twist. The monitoring needs to start and stop automatically. To do this we will rely on the screensaver. We will start monitoring when the session is locked (either automatically when the screensaver starts or when the user locks the screen manually).
Requirements
Assuming we are using one of the recent Ubuntu versions, we will require two additional things:
- Webcam surveillance software: motion
- My Perl script which detect when the screen is locked (see attachments)
Installation
- Install motion using the Ubuntu Software Center. Find it using the search box. (Alternatively you may apt-get it)
- Press Alt+F2 and type:
Explanation: We need this to run motion without root privileges.Code:gksudo cp -Rp /etc/motion ~/.motion; gksudo chown -R `whoami` ~/.motion; gksudo chmod a+w /tmp/motion- Download the attached archive (src-mon.tar.gz) to your home folder.
- Go to your home folder (Places --> Home Folder), right click the archive (src-mon.tar.gz) and select Extract Here.
- Make sure the script starts automatically after login:
System --> Preferences --> Startup Applications --> Add
Name: Idle Webcam Monitor (can be whatever you want)
Command: perl ~/.motion/src-mon.pl
Comment: Leave empty or write whatever you like.- Log out and log back in.
Usage
- Lock your screen or wait for the screensaver to fire up.
- When the screensaver is active you have 30 seconds to leave your room before the webcam starts monitoring it.
- After you come back you again have 30 seconds to unlock the screensaver. Any motion longer than 30 seconds prior to unlocking will be recorded.
- Look into /tmp/motion too see what was going on while you were away.
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