HA PIRcam

HA PIRcam Node Red Dashboard Features 

Node Red provides a dashboard interface integrating:

• PIR sensor (AM312) attached to a Raspberry Pi 2B running Node Red and piVPN

• Cloud Storage in Google Sheets of PIR activity

• Display of PIR activity on Dashboard

• Raspberry pi Camera 2 attached to Pi Zero W running MotionEYE

• Display of MotionEYE preview images and video on Dashboard

• Push notifications via email of any activity detected by PIR or MotionEYE

• ALEXA Audio Alert announcements through Amazon Echo Dot

• Use of Google Translate to provide Text to Audio for the announcements

• Audio arming of Alarm system through ALEXA

• Detection of presence of Mobiles in residence 

• Automatic arming of Alarm system when designated Mobiles away from residence

• IFTTT geofencing facilitating switching and disabling of ALEXA Audio Alerts

• Use of MQTT

• Tensorflow object recognition used to minimise MotionEYE false alerts (running on RPI Zero 2W)

• piVPN allows the Dashboard to be accessed securely through OpenVPN outside the local network.

The PIR sensor is attached to a Raspberry Pi 2B. A Raspberry Pi Camera 2 is attached to a Pi Zero W running raspian Bullseye OS and MotionEYE. Node Red on that Pi 2B is used to create a Dashboard web interface with cloud storage in Google Sheets of PIR activity and notification alerts are sent via email for PIR and MotionEYE activity. The sensors and alerts can be controlled individually either via the Dashboard or the whole system armed/disarmed by voice commands through Alexa or automatically whenever all resident mobile phones leave/return to the premises. 

MotionEye alone produces too many false positives so images flagged by MotionEye are screened for presence of a person using the object detection on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W running Bookworm OS 64, which is more powerful than than the Pi 2B is therefore used to run the more resource intensive node red Object (person) detection node tfjs-coco-ssd. The Pi Zero 2W also hosts the  MQTT server for communication between the Pi 2B and Pi Zero 2W. (By having the server running on the Pi Zero 2W it allows easy flagging within the software of a disruption in object detection.) If a person is detected then an alert is sent out as an email.

The principal mobile phone runs IFTTT with email notifications directed to the account associated with the Node Red Flow. Email notifications are sent when leaving or entering a geofenced area around the residence. These are used in Node Red to set the optional ALEXA Audio Alerts to either away or home so that on PIR motion detection an appropriate audio response is produced for either an intruder or returning resident on an Amazon Echo Dot acting as a Bluetooth speaker, e.g. an audio announcement in the home of "I know you are there" and "Welcome Home" on return.

Static preview images of movements recorded by MotionEYE can be swiped through in the Dashboard as well as their full associated motion videos viewed.

The Raspberry Pi 2B is also running PiVPN so that the Dashboard can be accessed securely via OpenVPN outside the local network.