Night Pi-sion Camera

I purchased a NoIR Raspberry Pi camera a while back thinking I would replace my outdoor night vision surveillance camera feed with a smarter version. All I wanted it to do was to be able to pan around and maybe even tilt a bit. Of course I also need to be able to access and control it remotely so I can see if there are any night creatures lurking about outside the urban jungle of New York city.

It turns out that it’s not so difficult to build a night vision surveillance camera out of a Raspberry Pi. I used the exact same build setup for the other remote cameras I already have around the apartment with the exception of 2 parts. The pi camera has to be the NoIR one, which is basically a regular pi camera without the IR filter. It’s just a small piece of plastic that is on top of the camera lens that filters out the infra-red color spectrum. They actually ship you the IR filter film that you put on your NoIR camera to turn it back into a regular pi camera.

The other part you would need is an IR illuminator which is basically a flood light that the naked human eye does not see. I got this off Amazon for 10 bucks which even had a light sensor embedded in the middle to make sure the IR leds are only turned on when it was dark. This saves on power and extends the life of your IR leds.

What I did not anticipate was how difficult it would be to design a pan and tilt mount that would sit on top of a stepper motor. I reused the stepper motor platform I built into an old Harrod’s chocolate tin can that used to hold a webcam. I wasn’t sure this stepper motor would be up to the task as I needed it to carry the IR illuminator along with the rest of the contraption on top of it. I’ve had issues before where this particular stepper motor refused to move when a bit of force is applied to it.

The first tests were very positive though as it is able to smoothly move the IR illuminator with no problems as you can see in the video below. I made a makeshift platform using a prescription bottle that I then put on top of the stepper motor spindle. I hoard a ton of these little bottles in the hopes of someday using them for a project. Today happened to be that day!

A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned

I had to change out the tripod also as it was just too flimsy to hold up the entire device. Luckily, I had more of those prescription bottles lying around 🤣. I also had a ton of pennies that’s been sitting in my car weighing it down. So I decided to finally clean up and put them on three prescription bottles to use as the base of my night pi-sion camera. I had so much of them that I even had a bit left over after filling three bottles.

Making it Smart

All that is left now is to set up the raspberry pi zero and install UV4L on it. UV4L performs perfectly even on a very low powered raspberry pi zero. You can stream video from the pi on any browser in the same network. It works exactly the same whether it’s a desktop or mobile browser.

I need to work on building a unified UI for all my pi cameras. I currently have 5 of them littered around my apartment. A unified UI will allow me to see all the feeds at the same time and control the pan-tilt motors on them. I also plan to put a bit of ML for object and person recognition using all the video feeds from the pi cameras. That way I won’t even need to look at the video feeds to find out if the apartment happens to be on fire!