Make A Baby Monitor From An Old Camera And Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a device of a thousand guises — this time around it’s a baby monitor concealed inside a pleasing exterior. Instructables user PitsLamp has all the information you need to construct your own. All you have to do is sort out the materials (and the time to build it).

In the tutorial, an old Polaroid camera is used, but any shell or chassis that has space for the Pi board and camera will do the trick. Then all you need is the following components:

• Raspberry Pi B model 2
• microSD card
• Wi-Fi USB dongle
• Webcam with microphone
• 1A Power supply

The Pi is configured to run Raspian, the default operating system for the device and Mumble, a VoIP chat program commonly used for gaming. Mumble can be set up to activate based on sound, which makes it perfect for picking up noises your baby makes. You can even fine-tune the threshold for your the lungs of your particular spawn.

For streaming video, ffmpeg is used. Depending on what you want to do, this can be configured to store recorded images, or just provide a stream.

The full steps are available from the Instructables link below.

Polaroid baby monitor with RPi [Instructables]