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meye os

Have you ever left home thinking what your pets are doing inside while you are out and about?

Me too, that’s why I decided to use my old Raspberry Pi 3B+, install MotionEyeOS on it and configure it to automatically sense motion, save video over the network and send a notification via Gotify!

I also wanted to create an enclosure and have it be discrete, hence why I decided to go with a cookie tin for the enclosure. I used some zip ties to keep the PI away from the rest of the enclosure, allowing for some cables to be nestled inside if needed.

A shelf with books on the left, a tin cookie box on the right atop a small box, a pen and bowl are also visible.
Picture of the Pi used in this project in it’s natural environment, a shelf where it is disguised.

I used a Pi Camera module which are super easy to use, especially with MotionEyeOS which detects them automatically.

Now that we mention the OS, MotionEyeOS is an old distribution for Pis that essentially works only as an AVR with motion detection. By default the motion sense is not activated but the UI is easy to navigate and configuration is a breeze.

A tin can with a Pi inside and a USB webcam
On the left you can see a Logitech webcam, on the right you can see the cookie tin can that contains the Pi, you can also spot the Pi camera inside the tin can. The items sit in a shelf.

My default configuration was detecting motion, over 6% difference, which would start capturing video and while the motion was still active it keeps capturing the video.

The default was to save the videos to the SD card in the PI and you can then either use the WebUI to view them or you can enable a SMB server on the pi so you can connect to it directly and get the files that way. However, for me this is not very good as the SD cards are fragile and we should avoid writing and reading from them as much as possible. So I changed the default save path to be the SMB folder from my Homelab server.

You can also setup hooks, I had a hook on file save to also send it to Nextcloud via WebDAV and a webhook when motion was detected to send me a notification to my Gotify instance.

We can see my cat going for food while we were on vacation.