Rear Window

Outsourcing the paranoid neighbor to machines

Description

One machine (let's name him Jeff) sits at the window and takes pictures. If something happens Jeff tells another machine (Let's call her Lisa). Lisa takes a look at the picture and tells everyone about what they saw.

Technical Description

A Raspberry Pi with a webcam uploads photos to a webserver - if there is enough change to the previous one. The webserver analyses the picture with Google's Tensorflow and tweets the best match.

Possible improvements

• Tweet sentences: Provide a dictionary with some randomly picked sentence: e.g. 'Just saw a {{word}} passing by.' or 'Oh look, a {{word}}!'
• AllInOne: Due to hardware limitiations it's currently not possible to install tensorflow on a raspberry - See this issue for details.

Requirements

Photo collection - Jeff

• Raspberry Pi or similar device
• cheap USB-webcam

Image processing and publishing - Lisa

• a webserver (Let's name her Lisa) for processing

Configuration

Generate a passphrase for secure storage

cd <<project_source>>
openssl rand -base64 64 > .vault_passphrase

Create the vault - delete the existing file if necessary

ansible-vault create group_vars/jeff/vault.yml

Add this content to group_vars/jeff/vault.yml:

---
vault_wifi_name:
vault_wifi_passphrase:
vault_lisa_token:

Configure the raspberry

• Install the default raspbian-image
• Find out the raspberry's ip address
• I strongly recommend to enable passwordless SSH access on the raspberry and disable password-based login: sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config and set PasswordAuthentication no
• Set the found ip address as the ip address of jeff in the file named hosts.
• If you want to enable wifi, set the name and passphrase in ansible-vault edit group_vars/jeff/vault.yml

Installation/Update

ansible-playbook jeff.yml