Book Image

Building a Home Security System with BeagleBone

By : William Pretty
Book Image

Building a Home Security System with BeagleBone

By: William Pretty

Overview of this book

One of the best kept secrets of the security industry is just how simple the monitoring hardware actually is - BeagleBone has all the computing power you need to build yourself an extremely sophisticated access control, alarm panel, and home automation and network intrusion-detection system. Security companies make a fortune each year by charging exorbitant fees to their customers. You will learn how easy it is to make an alarm system with Beaglebone. A company-maintained-and-monitored alarm system has its place - your dear old mum is probably not going to be creating her own system any time soon. But if you are reading this book, you are probably a builder or a hobbyist with all the skills required to do it yourself. With Building a Home Security System with BeagleBone, you will learn everything you need to know to develop your own state-of-the-art security system, all for less than a year's worth of monitoring charges from your local alarm company! You will start by building and testing your hardware and open source software on an experimenter's prototype board before progressing to more complex systems. You will then learn how to test your new creations in a modular fashion and begin to utilize BeagleBone. Once your system is built and tested, you will install some of the professional-grade sensors used in modern alarm systems and learn how to use them. You will also discover how to extend your alarm system in a variety of different ways. The only limit will be your imagination.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Bluetooth monitoring


Bluetooth monitoring can be done in much the same way as WiFi monitoring, with a few simple terminal commands.

To scan for Bluetooth devices within range, we use the scan command:

hcitool scan
Scanning ...
        00:60:57:10:29:50       Joe's 6310i

By running the previous command, we have found Joe's phone and now we can ask some basic questions:

root@beaglebone:~# hcitool  info  00:60:57:10:29:50
Requesting information ...
        BD Address:  00:60:57:10:29:50
        Device Name: Joe's 6310i
        LMP Version: 1.1 (0x1) LMP Subversion: 0x22c
        Manufacturer: Nokia Mobile Phones (1)
        Features: 0xbf 0x28 0x21 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00
                <3-slot packets> <5-slot packets> <encryption> <slot offset>
                <timing accuracy> <role switch> <sniff mode> <SCO link>
                <HV3 packets> <CVSD>

We can also "ping" Joe's phone (or any other Bluetooth device where we know the...