Update: Phenomena Discovered!

A couple of days after starting this system, it was able to detect and record an individual breaking into our apartment! The Police arrested the man and removed him from our flat. Here's a picture of that happening...

Flat Security

The day prior to writing this little program, some posessions that my flatmate and I own magically gained the ability to move without their owner (us) touching them. We both love discovering new phenomena; this program might give us a helping hand!

Features:

• Motion detection
• Record some number of seconds before the first bit of motion was detected
• Record some number of seconds after the last bit of motion was detected
• Save this recording as an mp4 with timestamps
• Upload the recording to a Discord server
• Recording only a certain area of the screen (i.e. crop the image)

Parameters

# VARS.py

# Top left and bottom right corners of the crop
CROP = ((800, 438), (1140, 764))
# Tune this parameter until you stop getting triggers when nothing is happening (lower = more sensitive)
START_THRESHOLD = 1.5
# Number of seconds to keep before the first bit of motion is detected
LEAD_RECORD_SECONDS = 3
# Number of seconds to keep after the last bit of motion is detected
AFTER_RECORD_SECONDS = 3

# Camera settings
CAM_HEIGHT = 1080
CAM_WIDTH = 1920
CAM_FPS = 30
# 1 = keep every frame, 2 = keep every other frame, 3 = keep every third frame, etc.
RECORD_EVERY = 1
# Of the frames that are being kept, average every n frames
AVERAGE_EVERY = 2
# Discord channel ID to send recordings to
DISCORD_RECORDING_CHAN = 1237290039516467255

Discord bot

Follow these steps to create a bot.

Make a file named discord_creds.json in the root of your flatsec directory.

{
    "token": "<YOUR TOKEN>"
}

Running

We run it on a Raspberry Pi 5 with a systemd service. tmux is nice because it lets you tune parameters without restarting the service. Use tmux a -t flatsec to join the active terminal.

Make sure you substitue <USER> with your actual whoami and <PATH TO FLATSEC>.

# /etc/systemd/system/flatsec.service
[Unit]
Description=Flat Security

[Service]
Type=forking
RemainAfterExit=yes
User=dude
ExecStart=/bin/bash /home/<USER>/startup/flatsec.sh
ExecStop=/usr/bin/tmux kill-session -t flatsec

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

```bash
#!/bin/bash
# /home/<USER>/startup/flatsec.sh

tmux new-session -s flatsec -d
tmux send-keys -t flatsec "cd <PATH TO FLATSEC>" C-m
tmux send-keys -t flatsec "sleep 3" C-m # possible that USB camera isn't initialized yet
tmux send-keys -t flatsec "python3 detection.py" C-m