Raspberry Pi Dummy Camera

This project uses the Raspberry Pi V2 8MP camera inside a dummy camera dome to provide a fully fledged 25FPS motion-JPEG IP camera. The IP camera is based on the MotionEyeOS for the Raspberry Pi 3. It is powered by a 5V USB wall adapter.

Parts

To build this IP camera you need the following parts:

• 1x Dummy Home Surveillance CCTV Security Dome Camera w/ Flashing Red LED Light - eBay 5USD
• 1x Raspberry Pi 3 - Model B - ARMv8 with 1G RAM - Adafruit 40USD
• 1x Raspberry Pi Camera Board v2 8MP - Adafruit 30USD
• 1x Universal EU 2A AC Micro USB Cable Power Wall Charger Adapter For Mobile Phone - eBay 3.50USD
• 1x Dummy Camera RPI3 Holder - custom - ivc 12USD
• 1x Dummy Camera RPI Camera v2 Holder - custom - ivc 10USD

3D parts

The holder for the Raspberry Pi camera is custom designed to to fit inside the dummy camera dome. It is made to allow adjustment of the view along the vertical axis.

To keep the Raspberry Pi 3 in place, there is a "X" bracket that fits between the existing screw bosses inside the enclosure.

• [Dummy Camera Raspberry Pi holders] - CAD models - STL, STEP, Inventor IPT

Build

Open the dummy camera and disassemble the internal parts. Remove the unused parts like the LED, battery tabs, adhesives, and fake camera lens compartment.

Use a flush cutter to remove all battery cavity, ring around the buzzer grill, excessive extruded plastic tabs, and on/off tabs. Make sure to keep the three screw bosses and support bosses intact. Use good tape to keep the battery compartment cover in place.

Note: The optical quality of the transparent dome plastic is far from the best, the view is a little distorted and not consistent. To get the best possible picture, it is important that the RPI camera is touching the inside of the dome to minimize the distortion through the transparent plastic.

Mount the RPI camera inside the custom camera holder and insert the black internal support inside the dome. Use adhesive tape to secure the custom holder at the desired vertical angle.

Put on the RPI board holder and mount the RPI at an angle, up-side-down.

Make a small notch at the rear of the bottom plate and connect the USB power with a knot as strain relief.

Close up the bottom and top enclosure. Make sure to align the tabs on the top and bottom enclosure to get a good fit.

Configuration

Download and copy the MotionEyeOS image to a SD card using the following Wiki installation guide

• MotionEyeOS Installation

Connect ethernet and find the DHCP ip address for the RPI, or connect HDMI and setup the wifi. Open http://192.168.x.x and use 'admin' as the login to configure MotionEye. The camera should be automatically be detected if it is connected.

Change settings:

• Services:
  • Enable FTP server: off
  • Enable Samba server: on
  • Samba write support: on
• Expert settings
  • GPU Memory: 384MB
  • Enable System Monitoring: on - for system temperature, load and bandwidth usage
• Video device
  • Frame rate: 30
  • Video Resolution: 1024x768
  • Video rotation: 0 degrees
• Text overlay: on
• Video streaming:
  • Streaming Frame Rate: 30
  • Streaming Quality: 75% - for about 1MB/s stream
• Still images: off
• Movies: on
  • Movie Quality: 75%
• Motion detection: on
  • Frame Change Threshold: 2%

The streaming address for MJPEG will be http://192.168.x.x:8081 and for current still image http://192.168.x.x/picture/1/current/.

References

• Low-cost Security Camera using a Raspberry Pi