Ever wondered who was standing on the front porch, ringing the doorbell? Maybe it was the neighbor or the mailman. Maybe it was someone unfamiliar. Home Secure— the affordable, smart doorbell and camera — is perfect for those moments.

There’s a new system that allows you to screen your visitors just like you screen your calls, keep your home safely monitored while you’re out, and even receive updates when your family members return home safely. Its name is Home Secure.

It is the smartest, most cost effective solution to monitoring your doorstep and the rest of your home. It’s a totally wireless monitoring solution that can be installed anywhere.

Home Secure even allows guests to leave a voice message. Vibration Sensors can be spread throughout the windows of your house, so that intruders will be caught and you will be notified if one is opened.

Home Secure is the universal home-security system that connects to your smart phone to make protecting your home or office easier than ever. Imagine having the convenience of a butler, organization of a secretary, and protection of a security guard rolled into one, easy-to-install monitoring system. That’s what Door Defender offers.

It consists of one Home Secure that acts as a camera, doorbell, and alarm system. It can be used individually, inside or outside, or with Vibration and Motion sensors. Each Door Defender device sends alerts to your smart phone within seconds of recognition, whether that be photos, or voice messages.

Why do you need Home Secure ?

> Who is at my door? Do I need to answer him?

> Did my kids get home safely from school?

> Is a stranger approaching back of my house or tampering with windows?

> Did delivery man drop off my package?

> Did the mail come yet?

> Is my child safe while home alone?

> Did someone actually let the dog out?

Step 1: Prerequisites

1. Intel Galileo Gen 2 Board with Debian Wheezy / Yocto*.

2. USB Webcam.

3. PIR Sensor,Buzzer

4. Micropone.

5. LCD 16x2

6. Internet Connectivity.

Besides these, the Galileo should be installed with v4l-utils which is required for taking image.

*This project is implemented with Debian.Hopefully it should work with Yocto as well.

One last thing. As far now, we are not talking about any error that might occur in the implementation of the project. Later I'll talk about one problem that might be observed, not in all cases but certainly it can turn fatal!

Step 2: Setting Up of Hardware:

The brain of HomeSecure is Intel Galileo Gen 2, a mini computer that is connected to the USB Webcam, PIR Sensor and a switch.

The LCD is connected to display the current status of the HomeSecure.

Step 3: HomeSecure at Work!

As a person approaches the HomeSecure powered door of your house, the PIR sensor senses the IR of the approaching body,converts it into an analog signal and sends it to the Galileo.Invoked by the interrupt that follows, Galileo issues a system call to the USB Webcam by executing a python script.

The image is taken and meanwhile, the person has to push the switch for his voice to be recorded.

After this procedure, the voice(.wav file) and the image(.jpeg file) are both sent to your gmail account!

Step 4: Killing the Bugs!

Now, that was the outline of the functioning of the project. What follows below are some highlights on what can go wrong while implementing on your boards.

Firstly, there are donkey number of utilities available for clicking the photo like :

You can use fswebcam

'fswebcam -r 176x144 -S 2 -D 1 --set brightness=50% "photo.jpg" '

You can use ffmpeg

'ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -i /dev/v4l/by-id/usb-0c45_USB_camera-video-index0 -vframes 2 test%3d.jpeg'

You can use streamer

'streamer -c /dev/video0 -b 16 outfile.jpeg'

You can also use python-pygame

'sudo apt-get install python-pygame'

But all of them failed to execute at the first place. After so many searches on the goolge, I came to realise what might be the possible cause for this.

The problem was unavailability of framebuffer. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=652038 This link will clear your doubts on what I mean.Framebuffer is used for running graphical content on virtual consoles.

To check if it is present in your machine, type 'fbset -i' in the terminal.

In this case it was not so had to manually create it.

a. Append fbcon[2] & vesafb[3][4] to file /etc/initramfs-tools/modules .

b. Un-blacklist the vesafb module . You just need comment out the “vesafb” entry in the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer.

c. Update the kernel on your machine.

update-initramfs -u -k all

d. Update the grub 'update-grub'

e. Reboot the galileo/machine.

Now run fswebcam and it works!

It can be seen that the image “photo.jpg” is clicked and saved in home directory.

We can extend this project further by sending this image to gmail account of any person using Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).

After running a python script that implements SMTP, it can be seen that the image has been recieved in the mail.