This has been a dream of mine for years, but I’ve always avoided the project because of the costs I assumed were involved. However, writing for MakeUseOf often forces me to think a bit outside the box. How would I accomplish a home security system inexpensively or free?

As an automation engineer, I often have to work with machinery or equipment where a central processor needs to read data from a number of distributed sensors. So, for starters I would distribute “sensors” – both wired and wireless web cams – in and around my property. The question still remains, what central processing software could handle all of those webcams and accomplish the “alert” scenario I want? After doing a lot of digging, I finally found a very cool software application called Active Webcam that lets you do just that.

How to Build a WiFi Home Security System

In this article, I’m going to describe how you can set up a system of security webcams that will alert you to even the slightest intrusion into the space the camera is monitoring. Before we get going, I do need to make it clear that the download link above for Active Webcam is to a free trial version of the software. However, the trial version offers all of the features of the full version, except there’s a small “nag window” in the upper left part of each webcam. If you can tolerate the window (I know I can), then the software is the top free choice for what we need to accomplish.

Recently, MakeUseOf covered similar applications for your webcam, such as Mark’s article on two cool motion sensor applications, and a while back I also outlined how you could use webcams from all around the world to go ghost hunting with your browser. However, what I’m going to describe today is a combination of all of those things. We’re going to create a remote surveillance system that could monitor your home, your camp, your apartment – or all of the above, all at the same time. In essence you can create a giant personal surveillance network without limitations. Sound cool? Let’s roll.

When you first install Active Webcam you’re offered an easy wizard that steps you through setting up your first device.

As you can see even from this first screen – the software has a lot of capabilities. Not only can you capture input from cameras connected directly to your computer, on your home network, or over the Internet – but you can even generate a web page that you could access from anywhere to watch all of your configured cameras.

The next screen of the startup wizard helps you select which type of camera you want to connect to. Keep in mind that if you’ve set up a remote Wi-Fi webcam that has its own IP on your network, you can connect to it directly by selecting “Network IP Camera.”

The next screen in the wizard lets you choose from the three standard methods of broadcasting your captured video. You can stream it all to an external web server, you can turn your PC itself into a web server, or you can upload via FTP. In my case, I’m hoping to receive an email with a nice snapshot of the intruders that I can take over to the police station, so on this step I’ll select “None.” Once you’re past the startup wizard and you’ve set up your first device, go to settings and select “Motion Detection.”

This is the place where we can accomplish the magic. A few things to keep in mind here. First, set the sensitivity to what you want to accomplish. For example, in my case my cameras are sitting in an empty house where nothing should be moving. Setting it to 95% will fire off an email at the slightest movement. However, if you have a small cat or dog in the house, you may want to set it for 75% to 80% so that it ignores smaller movements. The last thing you want is a flurry of hundreds of emails because your cat decided to start playing with the webcam!

You’ll also notice that there’s an impressive array of actions you can take when the camera senses motion. Playing a sound or FTP’ing captured images are standard with most of these motion detection applications – but the one feature that is very cool here is that if you want, the application will not only send you an email, but it can also send an SMS message to your cellphone. Now that’s slick. Of course, in my case I want an email with snapshots of the intruder, so I select “Send Email” and then go into the email settings.

The email settings are very easy. Just configure your SMTP settings and remember to add which email address to send the alert to. You can add multiple ones by using a comma between them. The interval setting will wait before firing off another email when there’s more motion, and you can choose how many snapshots you want the camera to take. During a test run with my single laptop webcam watching for motion, I received the following email.

Okay, so it works – but what about really putting it to good use?

Build a WiFi Internet Surveillance Network

My first thought is a distributed surveillance system where you wire up a webcam at every remote location you want to monitor. This could be your elderly mother’s house, your camp way up north or maybe even your office because you suspect someone’s stealing your favorite multi-colored sticky notes. Whatever the reason, all you need to do is install your webcams with either their own Internet IP, or plugged into an Internet-connected PC running Active Webcam. For my global distributed network test, I visited Opentopia and selected three random webcams from several Universities around the United States.

Now, two of these cameras were obviously monitoring very quiet locations. However, the third webcam on the lower left was a college workshop where students kept walking in and out of the room. So I quickly configured the motion settings as described above, and then waited for one of the three cameras to trigger my alert. Sure enough, within about five minutes, I received my email alert.

I captured three snapshots of this student who had just walked into the room and stood at the table. Just imagine if this was your home or business security system. No need to rewind and review security tape – your wifi surveillance system will automatically capture and store the mugshots, and you’ll know about it instantly over email or your phone!

Can you think of other creative ways to use Active Webcam? Do you know of any other applications that would accomplish the same thing? Share your insight in the comments section below.

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Yes it would not only be freaking cool but it would be awesome as computer mouse control for handicapped people that do not have the ability to use their hands to control the mouse.

One of the MakeUseOf authors hit me with an awesome piece of software yesterday that I quickly downloaded and ran. You do need a web camera for tracking purposes and some time to be amazed.

You download the application from here. We grabbed version 1.1 and it weighed in at a shocking 2.5MB. You do need to make sure your web camera works before beginning. If it does not work with its native application or within another application it will not work with eViaCam. So get that straight first.

Fire up the application and you will see a screen similar to this:

Hit the green check mark (it was already clicked in the above shot as the red x is now available to stop it). If everything is set up with the defaults you will be able to move your cursor with your face. Even the slightest movement is recognized and moves the mouse. You can stare at an object to click on it and set other options as well.

Here is a quick video before we go further…

Now let’s see what we can configure:

Clicking on the configuration menu and then options will give you the following choices. We will start with general options:

That is where we can modify what camera to use, language and profile settings so more than one person can use this application seamlessly.

Using the first motion tab you can play with how smooth and how fast (acceleration) the mouse moves and picks up speed. Feel free to mess around with the options. Hit OK and see what works best for you.

The click tab shows how long you need to stare at a item before it clicks. You can also have it beep on click and allow for multiple click (double or triple click). The Click windows behavior I found worked best on Fast mode. But your mileage may vary.

The Startup tab speaks for itself and simply allows you to set startup options.

The advanced tab allows you to have the application find your face automatically or to make you choose it manually with your mouse. Automatically worked flawlessly for me. The bottom selection lets you choose a different on-screen keyboard than the one bundled with Windows. This allows you to type with your mind as well!

I love this! I don’t know how practical it is for me to use on a daily basis but it is awesome! Do you have suggestions on how to use this? We would love to hear about it in the comments!

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All you need is a decent webcam which will take good clear shots – a concealed webcam (like the ones embedded in a laptop monitor) would be better, rather than one which is perched on top of your computer, all exposed as if to say “cheese!“. Or use Skype which I discussed in a previous article (that isn’t motion sensor but still another good option though for checking up on your house).

Setting up a motion sensor on your computer would be useful for things like :

• finding out who is on your computer when you are away. Maybe your roommate is secretly reading your emails while you’re in the shower?
• have it covertly installed on your laptop in case someone steals it and you want to get a snap of your thief.
• use it to check on your home while you are away. In the case of Secure Cam, you will need to have remote access to your computer and therefore able to check the hard drive folder from another computer or your internet-enabled mobile device.

Let’s now take a look at both Secure Cam and YawCam and see which one is best.

Secure Cam

Secure Cam is the most basic package of the two. This will snap pictures of anyone and anything that walks in front of your webcam and sends the pics to a folder on your computer.

After setting it up, you first need to choose which webcam you are going to use.   So go to Device in the top menus. Clicking on that will take you to a screen where you can choose your webcam in a drop down menu. Once you have chosen your webcam, click initialize and that will start the whole motion sensor process. You can also choose how large you want your captured images to be.

Once all that is done, click on the image and that will bring up your options :

The options you need to look out for are :

• Tick all the boxes for saving images
• Decide at what intervals images should be snapped, under “save every ***** second(s)“
• Choose the folder paths to the captured images folders.  You may want to bury these folders deep so no-one else can find them.
• Decide how long you want the images to be archived for
• The most important one – set the minimum “Motion Trigger Level” for it to kick into action and start snapping images.   Zero means every movement gets snapped and 255 means they would have to be headbanging to Bohemian Rhapsody before the motion sensor detects them.   To get everything (otherwise, what’s the point of using it?), set the sensor to zero to make it ultra-sensitive.
• Choose how many images you want captured and saved at the one time.   The default is 5.   If you’re hoping to catch someone “in the act”, for the purposes of a criminal prosecution, then you may want to raise this level to perhaps 10 so you don’t miss anything.

Once the options are saved, you can close the open Secure Cam windows so there is only a small icon left in the taskbar. But behind that icon, here’s what’s going on in the background.

When someone walks in front of the camera, whether a snap will be taken will depend on how sensitive you made the motion trigger level. When the webcam detects a movement, small red squares will start appearing around the image area where the movement was detected. When the detection meter reaches the sensitivity level you specified in the options, the software starts snapping shots and then saves them to the folder path you specified.

That’s basically all there is to this software. When someone walks in front of the webcam, pictures are taken and saved. End of story. A pity that there is no ability to send the images to a FTP server or email address but the next one I tried DOES offer these extras if this is what you really need.

YawCam

Now this is MUCH better if you want all the bells and whistles attached to your motion sensor. This is surprisingly good for a freeware product and it is very easy to set up.

When installing, if you don’t already have Java Runtime, then it will tell you that you need to install this first.   Then go straight ahead and install YawCam.

When you start it up for the first time, this is the first thing you will see :

The first things you need to set up are :

Settings–>Camera–>Select Camera – select your webcam.

Settings–>Startup–>Enable Motion Detection – to start the motion detector

Window–>Motion Detection – to go to the set-up window for the motion detector

The set-up window is this here :

Everything is more or less pretty straight-forward. On the left, that big blue blob is my head (but the X-Files poster and Star Wars poster on the wall behind me comes out pretty sharp). Underneath, you have the bars showing that movement is happening and being picked up by Yawcam. Just like Secure Cam, when it reaches the sensitivity level that you specified in the settings, pictures will start being taken and sent to you via a variety of ways.

On the right, choose how you would like to be notified. You can save the images to your hard drive, have them sent to a FTP server, have the images emailed to you, run an exe program or play a sound.  Choose either one or them all. It doesn’t matter. Maybe you would like them emailed to you, with a backup going to your FTP server and a loud siren blaring “INTRUDER ALERT!” scaring the hell out of your snooper. Go on, let it rip.

With the last two, you can set up a really loud scary sounding alarm to go off to scare the hell out of those pesky kids who won’t stop playing with your laptop. Remember to disable it though before Grandpa goes on the computer or you’re likely to give him a heart attack.

If you want the images emailed, you will need to specify your SMTP mail settings. Just look for the POP / SMTP settings in your email program. Gmail’s is here if you happen to use Gmail.

And of course, remember to click that “enable” button there to start the motion detection.

All in all, I much prefer Yawcam for its wide variety of notification features. On the other hand, if you just want something simple and basic, then you may be drawn to Secure Cam instead.

Which one gets your vote? Or do you prefer another? Can you think of other uses for motion sensor software?

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But for the time being, while the developers and researchers fine-tune the whole operation, FluidTunes allows us to control iTunes “Minority Report” style. That is control iTunes remotely using your hands and feet. Using the built-in iSight, this application recognizes movements over predefined areas. As a result, if you move or wave your hands/fingers over an area with a button on your screen, you can make iTunes play, pause or play the next/previous track.

FluidTunes superimposes your iTunes library (which is displayed with Cover Flow view) over what your iSight sees – that is you and your environment. There are 4 large buttons set in the FluidTunes window: Stop, Play, Next and Previous. Any motion detected over these buttons will trigger them. You might want to play around with it to get the hang of controlling them. It’s not as easy as it sounds. While testing this app, I inadvertently skipped songs and stopped iTunes several times. It takes practice to be able to maneuver around this program swiftly.

Sifting through your music is as easy as swiping your hand (or foot) across the screen through the songs’ cover art. Each song is represented as a cover art so if you have a large library, this could take quite cumbersome. However, you could just open up iTunes, select the song you want and play it, then return to FluidTunes for control.

While this sounds pretty fun (and it actually is), it can be quite hard to use. You have to be in a generally well-lit room in order to allow FluidTunes to differentiate/detect motion. And you might want to move your other body parts away so that if you’re bobbing your head to the music, you won’t accidentally pause iTunes. And if you’re in a room with a lot of movement, like if you live with roommates, their movements could actually trigger FluidTunes. To curb this, all you need to do is minimize the app when you’re not using. Or get your own room.

So when does this application really shine? At parties. Everyone whom I’ve shown this to has gone “Waaaoooowww”. They always want to try it themselves. That’s when I try to convince them to get a Mac.

While it may not be able to solve crimes or stop them from happening, FluidTunes is definitely an exciting application but it needs more work put into it to be able to attain the everyday usability I crave for. If you would like to give FluidTunes a whirl, you’ll need to be running OS X 10.4.11 or higher, have a built-in iSight and an iTunes library. Well-lit room optional.

Have you tried this application? Any thoughts about it? Encountered any other application which is as cool as this? Let me know in the comments.

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