I have a Pi Zero 2W with some camera I bought for 3D print monitoring that never took off, but now I want to put a camera on my desk to see if the family dog comes into my room. And who opens the door to my room, because everyone is pleading the 5th.
Is there anything simple made for this purpose similar how dashcams operate with rolling file saves I can download? Did some google-fu, but stuff I found were too complicated for me to care (like install python, run this script, etc)
Hi Romeozor!
Are you limited to just running the raspberry pi zero on its own or would you be interested in feeding that video into something else to handle the video recording/analysis?
The RP zero can do a lot, and it could be as simple as having it record 24/7 and just tag instances of motion assuming your door is closed, but motion detection is pretty sloppy in 2025 and you will always get lots of false alerts. You will also run into problems with your SD card if you are recording to it 24/7 unless you buy a endurance one, which can bump the price a fair bit.
If I were you, I would investigate setting up a Home Assistant either on a separate raspberry pi 4 (if you have one laying about) or in a VM either on a proxmox server or even just running in the background of your PC (not a good long term solution, but good to test the waters).
Home assistant supports some really great plugins, one of which is called “Frigate”. And Frigate has built in object detection (Person, Dog, Car, Cat, etc etc)
I have personally had very good success running a raspberry pi 4 with home assistant and 1 HD CCTV camera using Frigate to do real time object detection. The beauty in this is it logs events when it detects a person, and any other objects you specify in your setup. Once setup, you can have it record 24/7 or just when it detects a person.
You can have your phone connected to the Home Assistant and have it ping you when it detects a person or just have a peep at the log when ever you feel like it. It is also a great way to open the wonderful door of home automation.
A small caveat, the RP4 is pretty low powered, so trying to run more than one or maybe two camera feeds into it will cause instability.
Give me a shout if you want some step by steps on setting this up. Or if you have to run everything on the RP zero, I am sure a little script can be made to set everything up.
PAWS
With a workaround you can enable loop recording on motionEye.
RPi’s are marketed as education tools and as such you can do lots of amazing things with them, but almost none are turnkey.
Yes, you can in principle attach a camera to your rpi, code some motion detection and store frames onto the default SD card - lots of code.
You can use the rpi as a better webcam and have a second computer run off-the-shelf monitoring software, such as frigate (btw - doesn’t require HomeAssistant, runs fine without it).
Or, you realize that the rpi is not quite the purpose made solution for the stuff you’re trying to accomplish and you spent some $60 on a security IP cam, plug the SD card from the rpi in there, and have the IP cam do the motion detection, frame capture, etc. out of the box.