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)

IPTraf


The other package we will be installing is called IPTraf, which is short for IP Traffic Monitor. This is a terminal-based program that monitors traffic on any of the interfaces connected to your network or the BeagleBone.

Once again, we save the tar ball to the /usr/src directory and then unzip it to a directory:

  1. First we get the tarball from the source website:

    wget https://fedorahosted.org/releases/i/p/iptraf-ng/iptraf-ng-1.1.4.tar.gz
    
  2. Then, we untar it into a directory:

    tar –xzfv iptraf-ng-1.1.4.tar.gz
    
  3. We then change to the iptraf-ng-1.1.4 directory, which was created previously.

  4. Type the following commands to compile the source code:

    ./configure
    make
    make install
    

    That's it we're done!

Note

One final note; file locations can be a moving target so if the preceding wget command doesn't work, a Google search should provide another location. The command is the same, but with a different web address.

Configuring IPTraf

Perform the following steps for configuring IPTraf:

  1. We run the program by...