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)

Configuring PuTTY


Now that we have the firmware installed, it is time to access it using PuTTY. In order to do this, we must first configure PuTTY:

  1. To start PuTTY, select the Session category and set the Connection type to SSH. Enter /<relay_domain> in Host Name (or IP address) and 22 in Port. For example, for my relay domain, williamprettysecurity-system1-ssh, the Host Name would be seen as in the following screenshot:

    Session category

  2. Select the Connection category and set Seconds between keepalives (0 to turn off) to 5.

    Connection category

  3. Check the Disable Nagle's algorithm (TCP_NODELAY option) checkbox. (This will make the connection more responsible.)

  4. Navigate to Connection | Proxy and set Proxy type: to HTTP. Enter try.yaler.net in Proxy hostname and 80 in Port.

    Proxy page

  5. Navigate to Connection | Data and enter root in Auto-login username.

    Data page

  6. Select the Session category, enter a name such as SSH via Yaler in Saved Sessions and click Save.

  7. Now that we have PuTTY configured to...