Animal Hotel

It's a box with a camera inside to let animals hang out in it in bad weather and watch them do funny things.

The idea is to do a few things:

• Monitor motion and send a message with a pic to a telegram channel
• Record a motion video and send to chat
• Have a streaming services to be able to watch them do things there :)
• Have some sort of LED lights in the box so that camera can make a good picture

It's a simple project I'm doing with my kids, nothing too sophisticated. You can use this to build a cheap monitoring and signalling thing.

Setup, if you want to build one yourself

• There is no package/installation script right now so it's manual for now
• Install motion and configure it (see on motion configuration below)
• Check conf.py for paths and stuff
• Check that motion user can execute the script and has access to the files the scripts use in conf.py

How it works

Everything is orchestrated by the cli.py file which will run commands. At this point, I only have the echo (just a test) and telegram commands implemented.

Configure telegram

telegram command in cli.py will send a message to your configured telegram channel (optionally with an image).

Before you can do this, you need to update the configuration: - add your bot key to telegram.key file - update conf.py with TELEGRAM_ settings that are right for you

If everything is properly configured you should be able to do this to send a message to telegram:

python3 cli.py --text="Sample text" --image="~/images/some-image.jpg"

Motion

I use motion to monitor motion detection and record videos or detected activities and take pictures. Here are a few of my settings in /etc/motion/motion.conf

picture_type jpeg
picture_filename motion-recent
target_dir /var/lib/motion
on_motion_detected python3 /home/pi/AnimalHotel/cli.py telegram --text "automatically detected motion" --image "/var/lib/motion/motion-recent.jpg"

The motion detection can really flood your telegram so the script has a limitation to send to telegram only so few seconds, per TELEGRAM_DELAY_SECONDS setting. The setting threshold 1500 in motion.conf drives how frequent the detection will be. You will need to play with this setting to find what works for you and your box.

Timer class

Timer class in timer.py is a little utility to monitor frequency of events. For instance, on_motion_detected in motion can happen every second. I don't want to send messages to telegram every second, but motion does not have functionality around limiting the frequency of events in fires. So I had to come up with my own, hence the Timer.

configuration

timer can be configured for different systems via conf.py settings:

#{SYSTEM}_TIME_FILE - the path to file timer will use to keep time in for this systems
#{SYSTEM}_DELAY_SECONDS - the delay in seconds before timer considers it's ok to fire another event for this systems
TELEGRAM_TIME_FILE = '/var/log/tools/telegram_time'
TELEGRAM_DELAY_SECONDS = 90

usage

from timer import Timer
my_timer = Timer(system='telegram')
if my_timer.can_run:
    print("Enough time lapsed since last run, going to do something here")
    my_timer.save() #this will tell the timer that you did an action, otherwise it would not know you did
else:
    print(f"Timer cannot run yet, {my_timer.seconds_since_last_run} only since last run, you need to wait for {my_timer.seconds_until_next_run} seconds")