Book Image

BeagleBone: Creative Projects for Hobbyists

By : Rodolfo Giometti, Charles A. Hamilton, Richard Grimmett
Book Image

BeagleBone: Creative Projects for Hobbyists

By: Rodolfo Giometti, Charles A. Hamilton, Richard Grimmett

Overview of this book

BeagleBone is a microboard PC that runs Linux. It can connect to the Internet and run OSes such as Android and Ubuntu. You can transform this tiny device into a brain for an embedded application or an endless variety of electronic inventions and prototypes. This Learning Path starts off by teaching you how to program the BeagleBone. You will create introductory projects to get yourselves acquainted with all the nitty gritty. Then we’ll focus on a series of projects that are aimed at hobbyists like you and encompass the areas of home automation and robotics. With each project, we’ll teach you how to connect several sensors and an actuator to the BeagleBone Black. We’ll also create robots for land, sea, and water. Yes, really! The books used in this Learning Path are: 1. BeagleBone Black Cookbook 2. BeagleBone Home Automation Blueprints 3. Mastering BeagleBone Robotics
Table of Contents (6 chapters)

Chapter 8. Intrusion Detection System

Nowadays intrusion detection systems are quite common but really expensive. In this chapter, I'm going to show how we can implement a cheap intrusion detection system with a reasonable quality using our BeagleBone Black and two (or more) webcams.

The system will be able to alert the user by sending an e-mail with a photo of the intruder.

The basics of functioning

As mentioned earlier, we're going to use two webcams connected with our BeagleBone Black via a USB bus. Then, we'll install and run a special motion detection software that is able to detect a movement into a dynamic scene. When the program detects a movement, it will take one or more photos of the moving object and then send the pictures via e-mail to a user's account.

Setting up the hardware

This time, the connections are very simple since they are just done using several USB cables.

In the previous chapters, we have seen how to set up a webcam (see Chapter 3, Aquarium...