https://github.com/syncom/emailimg-rpi
A simple tool that turns a Raspberry Pi into a security monitoring system, using email as transport layer
https://github.com/syncom/emailimg-rpi
Last synced: 7 months ago
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A simple tool that turns a Raspberry Pi into a security monitoring system, using email as transport layer
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/syncom/emailimg-rpi
- Owner: syncom
- License: apache-2.0
- Created: 2017-03-26T13:52:38.000Z (almost 9 years ago)
- Default Branch: master
- Last Pushed: 2017-05-23T18:17:25.000Z (almost 9 years ago)
- Last Synced: 2025-07-02T12:48:26.108Z (8 months ago)
- Language: Python
- Size: 21.5 KB
- Stars: 1
- Watchers: 2
- Forks: 0
- Open Issues: 0
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
- License: LICENSE
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README
# emailimg-rpi
A simple tool turns a Raspberry Pi (RPi) into a security monitoring system, using email as a transport layer. The script has only been tested with an outlook.com account and a sina.com account.
# What are needed
- A Raspberry Pi (version 1-3) Model B (needs Internet connectivity)
- A camera module (this would work: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/camera-module/)
- Python 2.7: smtplib, pyOpenSSL, ndg-httpsclient, pyasn1, PIL
- An email account (a free one can be obtained from live.com or sina.com)
## Email a JPEG image upon motion detection
Usage:
1. Install the camera module on the RPi, and enable camera module from `rspi-config` menu.
2. Obtain an email account that supports SMTP (e.g., from outlook.com or sina.com).
3. Override the corresponding strings in `.config` with the respective values, for the SMTP server name & port, email username (address), and email password.
4. Create a ramdisk of size 80M bytes to store motion-detected image files.
```
mkdir /mnt/ramdisk_motion
mount -t tmpfs -o size=80M tmpfs /mnt/ramdisk_motion
```
To make the ramdisk persist over reboots, add the following lines to `/etc/fstab`:
```
# ramdisk for camera capture
tmpfs /mnt/ramdisk_motion tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec,nodiratime,size=80m 0 0
```
5. Run `emailimg-motion-run.sh`.
6. (Optional) To turn off the LED red light in the camera module when taking pictures, edit the file `/boot/config.txt` to add / change the following line:
```
disable_camera_led=1
```
7. (Optional) To run the program upon system boot, create a cron job:
```
crontab -e
```
And add the following lines (and redirect stdout and stderr output
to a file)
```
# Upon reboot
@reboot stdbuf -oL -eL /home/pi/bin/emailimg-rpi/emailimg-motion-run.sh > /home/pi/bin/emailimg-rpi/emailimg.log 2>&1
```
In the above line, we use `stdbuf` tool in the coreutils package to
set line buffering for stdout and stderr, so that log messages are
written to the log file immediately. (If you wish to completely turn
off buffering for stdout and stderr, use the `-o0 -e0` options.)
## Email a JPEG image every 10 minutes (for time-lapse photography)
Usage:
1. Follow steps 1-3 as in the above section
2. Because we are going to write and delete a lot of files, in order to prevent the SD card worn out, create a ramdisk (of size 25M bytes) to store image files created during the process.
```
mkdir /mnt/ramdisk_still
mount -t tmpfs -o size=25m tmpfs /mnt/ramdisk_still
```
To make the ramdisk persist over reboots, add the following lines to `/etc/fstab`:
```
# ramdisk for camera capture (added 20160306)
tmpfs /mnt/ramdisk_still tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec,nodiratime,size=25m 0 0
```
3. Create a cron job to take a still picture from the RPi camera module every 10 minute. Do `crontab -e` and add the following:
```
# take still picture every 10 minutes, and email
*/10 * * * * /home/pi/bin/emailimg-rpi/email_raspistill.sh 2>&1
```
4. Do whatever you like with the emailed images. See the next section for time-lapse photography.
## How to make a time-lapse video from still images using Imagemagick and FFMPEG
1. Put all .jpg images to a directory, say `original`. Change to this directory.
2. Before converting to video, remove image meta info (to reduce the size of the final artifect):
```
list=$(find `pwd` -name '*.jpg' | sort)
mogrify -strip ${list}
```
3. (Optional) Turn images into grayscale, if a black-and-white video is preferred. Save grayscale images to a separate directory, say `grayscale`.
```
for i in ${list}; do convert -type Grayscale "${i}" grayscale/"${i}"; done
```
4. (Optional) Normalize the histogram of the images (original or grayscale) using [histmatch](http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/histmatch/index.php). Change into the directory of interest (`orignal` or `grayscale`), put the `histmatch` script there, and then do the following.
```
for i in ${list}; do ./histmatch -c gray ref.jpg "${i}" normalized/"${i}"; done
```
Here, `ref.jpg` is a reference image for histogram normalization. It is usually picked from `${list}.
5. Use Imagemagick to convert images of interest (in directories `original`, `grayscale`, `normalized`, respectively) to a MPEG video, adding 0.1 second delay between frames.
```
(Change into appropriate directory)
list=$(find `pwd` -name '*.jpg' | sort)
convert -delay 10 ${list} video.mpeg
```
Turn MPEG to MP4 using ffmpeg.
```
ffmpeg -i video.mpeg video.mp4
```
The final product is `video.mp4`. Enjoy!
## Some SMTP server settings
* outlook.com
- Server: smtp-mail.outlook.com
- Port: 587
- Note: Outlook.com is quite annoying, in that it asks for human
"verification" over and over again after a few emails are sent through
smtplib. I would avoid outlook.com email for this application.
* sina.com
- Server: smtp.sina.com
- Port: 25
##