After I got my car broken into (see my last post) I thought about how secure my house is. I do have security measures to keep people out however I’ve taken things a step further with my computer and almost no budget. What I’ve set up is a burglar alarm that will send a photo to my mobile phone if anyone approaches the back door of my house. The future is here! And it’s cheap – that will be good news to most readers.
What is required.
A webcam – anything will do – I had this one gathering dust at the back of my desk.
A computer with internet connection. I’ve chosen my main computer as it’s on most of the day so it makes sense to use this one – you might want to research low powered computer if you are planning on setting up a dedicated. Luckily for me my back room is also my office.
Lastly you’ll need an internet connection. Now for the clever bit…..
Download this free web cam software. This is one of a 2-part trick to get this system up and running. The software is called Yawcam (yet another webcam software). Install and run the program. Hidden in the menu is “motion detection”
Setting the motion detection to active you have a few choices of what you can do.
As you can see from the above menu there are options to select when movement is detected.
- Save the video/image to a file.
- Upload the image to a website (ftp upload)
- Send an email
- Run a software program
- Play a sound
For this set up we are going to select “Send an email”, I’ve also selected play a sound so I know the detection is working. This helps when configuring the email settings and making sure motion is detected but the cat is not!
In the example below I’ve chosen to use my gmail account to send the email. Now these settings are important.
I’m not going to go through all the settings here if you need help call me. I’m in in your city and will happily help anyone set up this system for a fee 
As mentioned it’s a 2 part trick – we’ve got the system sending an email when motion is detected – all working and tested. The next part is to get that email in the form of a text message. Now this might not be a concern if you have a blackberry or a phone with push email. However you want to know as soon as motion is detected so a text message to your phone is probably going to be the best solution.
I use a service called TextMagic which is basically an online service that provides email to sms (text messages) Sign up with them and you’ll be charged £0.068 per text message. You’ll also get an email address to use with the service. I would recommend that you do not tell anyone this email address apart from the box in the image above.
I’ve sent up similar systems to text me when a room gets too hot, this was handy when the server room at my work’s air conditioning had a intermittent fault!