So, my place got an unwanted visitor last friday.

UPDATE: He's been arrested and some of my stuff has been found back! Strike through items have been recovered



If you happen to come across any of these items, please contact the Wellington police force?

Limited Edition Final Fantasy XV Playstation 4 plus Final Fantasy XV Controller

A Gran Turismo Sport disk in the drive



PS4 headset (without cables, ironically)



Also included is an urban camo controller (not unique, but still originally mine)

Nikon D3200 with 2 lenses, in a camera bag

28-85mm lens (not entirely sure about the range)



70-300mm lens



Various accessories like filters etc.

Dell XPS15 charger (just the charger, not the laptop!)

Raspberry Pi with Touchscreen, as a single unit, 15”

Simple flashlight without battery pack (I still have the battery pack)

Logitech MX computer mouse

Delain - Moonbathers limited wooden box edition

Logitech pouch with several cables

Logitech pouch with precision screwdrivers

Brandless USB DVD-writer/reader (yeah, 5 dollar on AliExpress, worth hardly anything)

20Ah Power Bank, white with Orange charging cable build in

Network cable tester

Network cable pliers

4 Kitchen knives (As in, cutting knives, not normal table cutlery)

Apache grey/silver and black single-hand operation pocket knife

USB3 to SATA connector plus power connectors

Get your own Raspberry Pi Security Camera

But as police was very impressed with my camera footage, I'm going to simplify the instructions on my previous post here.

There are multiple other places to buy these things, but you can get it all from the Raspberry Pi store. I suggest simply googling which shop in your country sells the stuff and you're all good.

An SD card can be bought almost around every corner, but I suggest getting a good quality one, Samsung and SanDisk are the highest rated cards. So that's almost always a good choice. Although there are cheaper options, I would not recommend those, as they are more error-prone, therefore your camera system might crash without you knowing. Which would be a shame.

Bad things tend to happen at the most ironic moments (in my case, I've been looking at home insurances for the last few weeks, but haven't gotten me one yet... Ow the irony!).

What you need:

Raspberry Pi (any version will do) 4GB or larger MicroSD card Raspberry Pi Camera module (USB camera works, but the camera module is better, especially the NoIR version) Micro-USB charger (Micro) SD Card reader on your pc or mac MicroSD card adapter

Optional:

Raspberry Pi case with opening for the camera module lint

Camera housing

Assuming you've got all the required hardware, let's go to the set up.

There's a very easy way to set up MotionEye, namely, MotionEyeOS. Depending on the Raspberry Pi you got, download the appropriate version from GitHub. If you have a Raspberry Pi zero or zero-W, you'll need the non-numbered Raspberry Pi image.

Download the image and extract it with WinRar. This will give you a ".img" file which you need to put on the Micro-SD card. Put the MicroSD card in the SD adapter and hook it up to your computer. For windows, you'll need Win32DiskImager to get the image properly on the card. For MacOS, it's best to use Etcher, as it is a graphical interface that's friendly. There is also a more technical way, if you want to follow that way, you can google it.

From here on, I'm going to follow the Windows way of installing, but the MacOS procedure is fairly similar.

After inserting the SD card in to your cardreader, start Win32DiskImager. The interface is a bit simple, but that's okay. You may want to maximize the window to get the full view. Click on the folder icon near the top right and browse to where you extracted the img file and select it Win32DiskImager will not let you write to your own harddisk, so that's good. Once you've inserted the disk, it will let you select it from the dropdown next to the image selection field. Don't bother about the hash/generate/copy options. Click the "write" button, after selecting the proper drive and image.

Once that's done, it's time to assemble everything. Your SD card is ready to operate your Raspberry Pi now.

To set up your wifi, if you don't have a network cable for your pi, follow the following steps, don't remove the SD card from your computer yet, but follow these steps:

Open Windows Explorer and browse to your drive containing the microSD card. You should see files such as: bootcode.bin

loader.bin

start.elf

kernel.img

cmdline.txt Right-click in the right window pane and select New Text Document. Now, right click on this file and rename it wpa_supplicant.conf. Make sure to remove the .txt file extension! Once again, right click on this file and select Edit with your editor of choice. Notepad won't work, as the editor needs to have "Linux style line endings"! Paste the following contents into your blank file Change the country to match your Country, e.g. NZ for New Zealand or US for the United States of America Change the ssid to match the name of your WiFi Change the psk to the password of your wifi

country=NZ

update_config=1

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={

scan_ssid=1

ssid="WiFiSSDHere"

psk="WiFiPasswordHere"

}

Your SD card is now fully prepared to become your CCTV. You can eject it and continue on assembling your Pi setup.

To prepare your Pi, follow these steps, in order:

Insert the SD card in to your Raspberry Pi If you have a case for the pi, put the pi in the bottom half of the case If you have a case, take the camera lint that came with the camera and put it through the top half in such a way that the blue tab face the side of the USB slots Connect the lint to the connector somewhere in the middle of the Raspberry pi* Lift the tab of the connector carefully, and gently slide the lint in to the slot, the blue end still facing the USB slots of your Pi Push the tab down. Your Pi camera lint is now in place. If you have a case, you can now close the case. Depending on your type of case, follow the instructions it came with. Usually it's a matter of simply pressing it together Connect the other end of the lint to your Pi Camera module Lift the tab on the bottom of the Pi Camera module Gently slide in the end of the lint, the blue tab facing away from the module, the exposed connector to the front of the camera Push the tab back up Your camera setup is now ready to go! Position the camera and your pi in a place you want, having the best view of your place is probably a good idea Connect the USB charger to the Micro-USB of the raspberry pi

When booting a fresh image installation, a few initialization steps will take place and therefore the system won't be ready for about 1-2 minutes. Please do not disconnect or reboot your board during these first two minutes!.

Once booted, your camera module is ready to use! You can set it up by going to the IP of the camera in your browser of choice. To find the address, connect to your router (most routers can display the addresses of all connected devices) and look for a device name beginning with "meye-". Put this IP in the address bar of your browser and you'll be greeted by the login screen for MotionEyeOS.

Congratulations! You now have a cheap home security camera that will amaze police officers because of the quality of the images!

At first access, the username for the interface is "admin", without a password.

After your first log in, you can and should set up an admin password, same as for the surveillance user.

The surveillance user is on port 8081 of your Pi. You can access it by going to the IP of your Raspberry Pi and add ":8081" directly after the IP (before a possible slash!)

Play around in the settings of your MotionEyeOS. I strongly suggest setting up a notification to an email address or other service.

Using a GMail account to send the email is the easiest and most straight forward to go. But from here on, everything is up to you.

A preview of the incredible quality of the Raspberry Pi's camera, can be seen by clicking the circle image of this post at the top. It's a snap of the person that took some of my belongings. The New Zealand police force was incredibly impressed with the quality!

If you want to set up multiple Raspberry Pi's with MotionEye, you can have one central Pi that displays the imagery of all the camera's you have. Everything you might want to know about your new Security Camera can be found in the MotionEyeOS wiki pages. For setting up multiple pi's to connect to stream to one central Pi, have a look at the Usage Scenarios page.

More advanced setups can be found in my previous post.

*: