Low-Cost Home Security

Intrusion-detection is something you can get - from ADT, say. This simple idea is one step ahead.

Have a camera positioned outside your house, looking at your property - say the walkway leading to your yard, or your yard. You need a loud-speaker, or simple audio-device and some processing power as well. You might be able to manage with Netduino or Raspberry Pi or something like that.

Here's what you do - if you detect motion - of a large enough sized body (maybe 3D is the way to go - 2 cameras?) - then you put out an audible alert. You should probably have a conspicuous camera (the fake) that makes the noise - so if the crook gets frustrated and decides to vent, you don't lose much.

You need a thingy on your keychain that's like a car-remote-key that you can use to disarm the thing for 5 minutes - maybe even do simple commands like 3 quick presses disarms for 1 hour, etc. When it's re-arming, you hear a special chime before you get the annoying buzz.

You're going for deterrence here. And low cost - there's not communication with a base-station, remote recording/monitoring, etc. I so badly want to get something like this working as a hello-world home-security project.

Resources :

Embedded Vision Alliance
MG International : Poseidon
Cernium Archerfish