Home security system with raspberry pi and Jetson boards

Hi guys,

I just saw the latest video on building a secure IoT system for home automation and thought I would share my open source project. This project uses a whole range of boards with a wide range of computation capabilities, all the way from pi zero to a Jetson Xavier.

Description

The key feature of this project is flexibility in that it allows one to mix and match a wide variety of hardware to enable security over a small or large area. Cheap & inexpensive pi zeros can be used to stream video over a network and the the other boards can be used for smart processing depending on what each board can do:

  • A pi 3/4 can do basic motion detection, record video and send it by email.
  • A Jetson nano can run an object detection to check if there is a person in the video and send the photo and video of the person via email.
  • A Jetson TX2 and above can pool videos from multiple cameras, and run object detection on all of them. Although not yet implemented, one can easily build upon this to have the jetson send alerts when specific objects are detected.

Link

I’m not allowed to include a link but the project is open-source on GitHub at: www.github. com/dataplayer12/homesecurity

Security

I must admit I did not think about security as much when I built the project. The email feature is an obvious weak point. The pis and jetsons are running linux and if a hacker can access the local network, the password is all that stands between them and total control over the devices.

Addendum on AI in network security

Wendell if you are reading this, I would love to work on an AI solution for detecting suspicious network activity for Iot devices. I have no problem with the AI part of it, but I don’t know about networking and the type of data needed. Since the data should be discriminative enough to train a machine learning model that could run on an IoT device, most of the stuff I can think of, like packets captured with wireshark would have too much extraneous info that would confuse a small model. If you could elaborate upon this here or in another video, it would be great.

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Welcome to the fray jaiyam!

Popping in here as I have been fiddling with IoT stuff for a little over a year now. A few lights (and a dehumidifier) over Z-Wave, gutted a security panel to bury a RPi3 + POE inside, OpenHAB to control that Z-Wave stuff and read a few enviro details (temperature and humidity in basement).

As part of a larger set of projects, I recently had installed a solar array - which came with some APsystems ECU-R-NA zigbee thing that I would prefer to keep disconnected - if I cannot just read the data off of it on my own terms.

I also still want to mount the RPi3+ (that has the Z-Wave controller hat and runs OpenHAB) near a more permanent battery-backed location of the basement. Add to all this mess Arduinos with DHT11 sensors and POE shields, a Dahua camera to mount in an outdoor location that still lacks the conduit to get anything there (power and/or networking), and a regulated cold-storage room that ideally would have some capacity as a cistern within, there is a lot to plan - for years to come.

1 Like

You reminded me of the most useful project I ever built: a ‘smart’ trashcan. It had an ultrasonic sensor and would open up when I went near to put anything in it. It had no network connectivity, no settings to fiddle with, literally a trashcan waiting for someone to come and throw stuff into. It was also totally invulnerable to any network security issues. I used it for over 2 years.

I am interested in seeing what comes of this. Over the last year, I have taken the IoT plunge to satisfy my wife and have gone with WiFi enabled devices that can have tasmota flashed to them. From there I am running HomeAssistant on an Odroid-N2 and some other items, including data storage for logs and images (no video yet) on a RPi4 with Radxa Quad SATA Hat as NAS Storage.

I have been holding off on the camera stuff for now until I can find some way to keep the Camera stuff internal to my network without needing to phoning home to the internet. I have seen some HIK Vision stuff that you can de cloud, but I am looking for 4K cameras with night vision and pan & tilt controls.
The goal is to tie all of that into home automation rules on HomeAssistant to take certain actions based on the information being fed.

Example, someone walks up to the door, start video, capture a detailed facial frame for later identity tagging and turn on, off lights depending on time of day and send notifications to our phones. Since we work at night and sleep during daylight, we would like to watch out for porch pirates as well as get notifications when certain services come to the house (Cleaning Service, Land Scapers, and etc)

Interesting product. I am amazed at how many new things are coming out, for home protection. Which can’t fail to make you happy. And the price is not so expensive. As far as home protection is concerned, I can recommend the smart doorbell. I thought it was a joke, but it’s more useful than I thought. So that you don’t waste your time looking for it I will leave a link, it’s just hard to find this site Home security system with raspberry pi and Jetson boards