Didier Stevens

Friday 5 August 2011

My Home Surveillance System: Some Details

Filed under: Arduino,Hacking,Hardware — Didier Stevens @ 11:02

I use Phidgets USB interfaces and sensors for my home surveillance system. For the moment, my home surveillance system consists of Python programs running on a PC, but once I’m past the experimental phase, I will migrate this to a dedicated controller.
I particularly like the PIR motion sensor Phidget, because it gives you an analogue output. When there’s no movement, the output will be around 500. With movement, the output value will oscillate around 500, with larger amplitudes for larger movements.This allows me to differentiate between small and large movements, and to eliminate false positives which are only of a short duration. If you have to run wires for many meters to connect your analogue sensors to the interface module, I recommend you use shielded wires and connect the shield to the ground of the interface module. This allowed me to eliminate noise I had on the readings.

Another plus is that the sensors are powered by the interface module. So if you power the PC (or micro-controller) with a UPS, your home surveillance system will also operate when there’s a power cut.

To take pictures when an event occurs (like ringing the doorbell), I use an IP camera. Take a look at my vs.py program to see how that’s done.

Friday 29 July 2011

My Home Surveillance System

Filed under: Arduino,Hacking,Hardware — Didier Stevens @ 10:21

Aside from having installed my own Home Automation and CCTV system, I also designed and installed a surveillance system at home. This post will discuss some of the design decisions I took. Some of them are different from more conventional alarm systems.

The surveillance system has many sensors in and around the house (passive infrared (PIR) sensors, reed switches, temperature sensors, …) and can take several actions, like starting sirens, turning on lights, sending text messages, making phone calls, taking pictures, … Which  actions are taken depend on the alert level that was set.

First design decision : this system is designed to deter common burglars, not burglars with inside knowledge of the system.

Second design decision is that the system will log all events coming from sensors, regardless of triggering an alarm.

Third design decision is that there is no alarm delay: if a sensor triggers that would cause the alarm to sound, then the alert sounds immediately. There is no delay or pre-alarm phase. I believe an immediate alarm has a greater deterrent effect. With this design, it’s best to avoid false-positives as much as possible.

Fourth design decision : use analogue PIR detectors, not binary PIR detectors. A classic (binary) PIR detector will just tell you that movement occurred. With an analogue PIR detector, you get the amplitude and duration of the movement, which is useful information to weed out false alarms, or ignore movement from small pets.

Now on to some interesting or unusual use cases.

I have a sensor on the doorbell too. When someone rings the doorbell, the event is logged and the system takes pictures of the front door. I’ve seen some interesting events since this doorbell sensor was installed. For example, I expected a package to be delivered after 18:00. The sender had instructed our national courier company to deliver the package after 18:00. You can probably guess they didn’t follow the instructions. I have evidence they attempted to deliver well before 18:00, and what’s even worse, they left a note saying they had passed around 18:15…

Like modern, commercial alarm systems, I have several alarm zones. For example, I can set the alarm level for when we go to bed. In this mode, the alarm will go off if there is movement inside the house, except in the bedroom and nearby rooms/hall. But come morning, you have to remember to switch off the alarm before you leave the bedroom.
Not with my system. If my system detects movement in the protected zone, and if there has been movement in the bedroom zone just before, it will disable the alarm in stead of sounding the alarm. So no false-alarms triggered in my house by sleepy-heads.

Outside lights that switch on when movement is detected are supposed to deter burglars, but they are so common that I believe the deterrent effect is negligible. My system turns on some lights inside the house when it detects movement outside while it is dark and there is no movement inside. I believe this has a much greater deterrent effect, because it’s so uncommon. And it will also take pictures. I now have a large picture collection of neighborhood cats in my back garden 😉

I’ve recently installed wireless interconnected smoke alarms. I will connect one smoke alarm to my home surveillance system, so that my system is aware when smoke alarms trigger and can act appropriately.

Testing all these functions is fun. I’m ” testing in production “, you can imagine that I don’t have a second home that I can use as a test system.
So sometime you can see me run around the house like a madman, but I’m just testing a new feature I programmed… 😉

Wednesday 9 September 2009

QuickPost: Arduino + Alcohol Gas Sensor + WiShield + LCD

Filed under: Arduino,Hardware,Quickpost — Didier Stevens @ 20:07

This is a little project I’m working on for Brucon:

20090909-212457

This is an Arduino with a WiFi adapter (WiShield), an LCD and a gas sensor (senses gases like ethanol).

What it does: the Arduino reads the sensor (uncalibrated for the moment), displays its value on line 1 of the LCD and also servers it on a web page (with an embedded webserver connecting to the WiFi network via the WiShield).
If the sensor read-out is 900 or more, a LED is turned on.
And I can send a message via the webserver to line 2 of the LCD.

The problem I had to solve: the LCD didn’t work when the WiShield was operating.

The cause: the WiShield library and the LCD library use some common pins.

Solution: change the pin assignment in the LCD library code (LCD4Bit.cpp):

// --------- PINS -------------------------------------
//is the RW pin of the LCD under our control?  If we're only ever going to write to the LCD, we can use one less microcontroller pin, and just tie the LCD pin to the necessary signal, high or low.
//this stops us sending signals to the RW pin if it isn't being used.
int USING_RW = false;

//RS, RW and Enable can be set to whatever you like
int RS = 1;
int RW = 11;
int Enable = 0;
//DB should be an unseparated group of pins  - because of lazy coding in pushNibble()
int DB[] = {3, 4, 5, 6};  //wire these to DB4~7 on LCD.

//--------------------------------------------------------

And don’t forget to delete LCD4Bit.o before recompiling the code. The Arduino IDE doesn’t check dependencies of libraries when compiling.

And yes, once calibrated, you should be able to use this alcohol gas sensor to prevent drunk e-mailing 😉 But you’ll need to add a sensor to verify you’re actually blowing into the alcohol gas sensor. For example a gas pressure sensor.

Quickpost info

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