I’ve been tinkering with some Home Automation ideas for a while. THere’s a raft of things that I would like to get to, but time and budget limitations means I need to focus more on what I can do, than what I would like to do. However, one very simple, and cost effective, project that I successfully completed was the development of a ‘HomeKit camera’ using a Raspberry Pi Zero. In short, I wanted a camera that faced my front door, so that I could see who was ringing the bell when there was someone there. I guess this is the slightly dumber version of things like Ring Doorbell cameras – and the dozens of other, similar competitors.
I happened upon this project (link) that provided an OS that did almost exactly what I wanted. It’s an OS that makes the Raspberry Pi Zero W’s camera accessible via a video stream in the Home App on any iOS device on the same network. It was laughably easy to set up – basically, I flashed the image, set up the Pi Zero with the camera attachment (I used the standard Pi Camera), and then configured the wpa-supplicant.conf file so that the Pi could access the wireless network. I then put the whole thing into a case and a mount that I had left over from a previous project, set it up in position, and tried it out. And it worked! I said it was easy.
I’ve noticed a few things that are a bit annoying so far: firstly, the refresh rate is not great, so people kind of appear and disappear, ghostlike, rather than you seeing them enter the screen. Also, there is no way of recording (unless you do something from your own device – e.g. screen recording). Finally, there is this odd bug where sometimes the video stream doesn’t get released, which means you can’t access it. Rebooting the device seems to work, however.
