Fruitnanny is a code name for a DIY geek baby monitor. It uses RaspberryPi, a NoIR camera module, infrared lights, temperature and humidity sensors, and a custom Web UI. Chrome and Firefox with native WebRTC are used as clients. Right now it means all major platforms like Windows, Linux, Android, MacOS, and iOS soon are supported.
Disclaimer
I assume that a reader worked with RaspberryPI system before and understand Linux systems. Feel free to contact me using Disqus or my email [email protected].
History
When my son was born in March 2016 I got a holly mission to find a video baby monitor. After some research, I didn’t find good candidates(too expensive or didn’t have some features) and, being a geek person, decided to build my own device. That time I had RaspberryPi v1 Model B which had been used for media center. My wife wasn’t happy with the idea but she didn’t have a choice.
At the beginning I thought it would be an easy task, probably someone already had built something similar. Google found dozens of projects but none of them had real-time audio and video capabilities which I wanted to have in my project. Some projects were trying to use VLC streaming, MJpeg or others technics. I was trying to use all of them but wasn’t satisfied. Then I stumbled upon UV4L project and it was promising, especially WeRTC part. I chose this project as a main software part of the project.
Another big part of the project was an additional hardware. Connect a camera to Raspberry is not a big deal, but because baby monitor works mostly during the night, it must have some infrared lights to allow night vision. Plus, it’s good to have sensors data like temperature and humidity.
I didn’t design electronics from the college and I had to refresh a knowledge.
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