Didier Stevens

I’ve developed a new application for my N800, psurveil (Photo Surveillance). It automatically takes pictures with the N800’s build-in camera at regular intervals and stores them as jpeg files.

You can find the installation package here (unzip and copy the deb package to your N800) and the source code here. And be careful, it’s beta. On my N800, it takes about 30 seconds to start, and it doesn’t run as root.

So if you’ve got a baby and are looking for an excuse to get an N800, this turns your N800 in a baby monitor, kinda.

From the source code:

psurveil (Photo Surveillance) is a program for the Nokia N800.
It automatically takes pictures with the N800’s build-in camera at regular intervals
and stores them as jpeg files.

usage:
– Pop out the camera, and close all programs using the camera.
– Start psurveil. On my N800, it takes very long to start, sometimes a half minute.
– Use the menu to review the settings.
– Interval is the number of minutes between pictures.
– Repeats is the number of pictures to take, minus 1.
– Folder is the directory to store the pictures. The directory must exist.
Settings are stored with GConf, and there is no input validation.
– Click on the “Start surveillance” buttons to start the surveillance. A first picture
is immediately saved, and another picture every Interval minutes, and this Repeats times.
The filename of the jpeg is composed with the date & time when the picture was taken.
There is no monitoring of free diskspace.

Example:
The settings for this example are:
– Interval=1
– Repeats=3
– folder=/home/user/MyDocs/.images
These settings will take 4 pictures over a period of 4 minutes, starting when the button is clicked.
Pictures are stored in the Images folder:
20071127-194647.jpeg
20071127-194747.jpeg
20071127-194847.jpeg
20071127-194947.jpeg

I developed this program by merging the example_camera.c and example_alarm.c Maemo example programs.
There are some quirks in the real-time video display, they originate from the example_camera.c program.
If you know how to fix this, let me know.
I’m not an experienced Maemo developer (neither GTK developer), this is my first program for the N800,
so use this program at your own risk, and respect the privacy of others.

I put my code for this program in the Public Domain. For the code copy-pasted from the examples,
read the copyright below.

Todo (no guarantee that these ever get done):
– Input validation
– Folder creation
– Toggle to flip the picture
–

History:
22/11/2007 example_camera and example_alarm merged
23/11/2007 jpeg filename is current date & time
25/11/2007 0.1.3 added menu & menu functions
26/11/2007 coded settings dialog
27/11/2007 0.2.0 code review
28/11/2007 0.2.1 input validation for numbers in settings dialog