2y ago

Are there any applications that can turn an old smart phone into a wildlife/security camera?

Have been thinking about this for a couple years. I have old phones kicking around. Battery shot, hardware dated, but the camera(s) and mic and antennas still work. Would be cool if there were a way to set them up (powered) to stream audio/video or even take stills at intervals (or motion-activated) and then sync the content to the rest of the devices on my network.

I don't know how complex the programming for something like this would be. But I suspect it's trivial for those who do know.

31 comments

I use old iPhones as video baby monitors in much the same way with an app called AlfredCamera, works pretty good for a free app on scrap hardware
- I've used it too, it works really well.
- I've run Alfred on Samsung Galaxy S4 and S4 Mini...those were realeased in like 2014.
  The free version of Alfred is surprisingly useful. And the pay version was about $35 a year.
  
  I’ve run it on an iPhone 5 or 6, I don’t recall… had it watching my living room for a month while I was away, and aside from a few false positives when light patterns changed due to the wind blowing tree branches around, it was excellent.
I tried using an old phone as a dashcam for a while. It just kept overheating. That's my vaguely related experience. Thanks for reading.
- Same. But I used it for a full screen clock.
  After a year, it just keeps crashing.
Haven might do the trick. It's motion activated and can stream content. Made by the guardian project / Snowden to warn you if someone breaks into your hotel room. Open source, too
- FYI, the Haven F-Droid repo has seemingly not been updated in 4 years. Latest available .apk is from 2019.
- Damn, thank you so much!
  
  You can use obtanium to install from GitHub and f droid and more, it even checks for updates
I've used one called "manything" (Monitor anything). It turns your obsolete cellphones and tablets into a network of web accessible security cameras.
- Thank you. I'll look it up!
I use IP Webcam on my old phones as CCTV cameras, one for the inside of my garage and the other in my 3D printer enclosure.
Both cameras Just Work as mjpg cameras in Home Assistant. No internet, nothing.
What I haven't (yet) tried doing is configuring them in my Frigate nvr (running on docker) - that might give you the complete package you're looking for.
I know there is, or was. A meth head I knew used old cell phones to watch to outside of his house. I saw the app and it worked really well. The phones were all on the same wifi and had no cell service.
- DroidCam.
  This thing was revolutionary.
  For some reason we couldn't get the cable TV outside, so we took our other TV and then streamed from inside via DroidCam watching the TV to the TV outside to watch sports, wasn't the best but it covered us for the day. Phones run red hot however (:
trivial for those who do know.
Erm, no
- Idk... Lots of devs I work with write software for mobile devices all the time. I could've worded it better I guess: I'm not a dev. 🤷‍♀️
  
  Yeah, making an app isn't hard in and of itself but trust me, no matter how easy something seems, it just keeps getting harder once you start building. I don't mean to say you couldn't make this app in a weekend if you have the right experience, but it's gonna be buggy until you spend quite a few more hours ironing out the kinks and maintaining it
  
  The hard part is the hardware as you should really remove the battery from the equation to prevent catastrophic damage from constantly draining and charging an old worn-out battery. Unfortunately most older phones won't run off wall power without a battery inside so one method is to solder some wires attached to ~4V to the battery contacts in the phone to trick it into thinking there is a battery present and allow you to run the device off USB power directly. This method might vary from phone to phone.
It's not exactly what you're wanting, but there is Remote Video Camera on F-Droid.
If I were doing it, I would look for an app that just implements the same basic functionality as a network-connected camera. Then video storage, alerting, motion detection, etc. would all be handled by something like zoneminder.
I'm not aware of software to achieve this, but I assume it wouldn't be possible to activate the camera based on motion detection, as the phones do not have hardware for this. Sure, it could be possible to have the camera working 24/7 and only record when there's movement in front of it (e.g. watching for pixel changes in the image being captured) but I doubt these cameras can sustain that kind of uninterrupted use, meaning at some point they will just fail. Just my thoughts, as I find the idea interesting but would love to have that same kind of solution.
- I doubt these cameras can sustain that kind of uninterrupted use,
  I had an old HTC phone that I used as a garage security camera for 2-3 years straight. It had to be restarted every couple months, but otherwise worked fine. Now you can get a $20 IP camera that surpasses it in every way tho.
  
  Glad to know. 2-3 years is a good lifetime, especially when compared against keeping the phone unused and stored in a drawer.
- The camera is on all the time, the recording/streaming only starts when requested or on motion detection. Did you expect a PIR sensor on a phone?
  
  The camera is on all the time
  That's what I meant: I don't know (as in I have zero clue) the camera is designed to operate that way. Is a naive assumption on my side and I'd be glad to learn this is not the case.
  PIR sensor
  No, I didn't expect a sensor, that's what I tried to say: the hardware is not there, so (on my mind) a constant image analysis/monitoring would be necessary in order to perceive movement and start recording, as in writing video to storage.

31 comments