Software quick-start:

For the purpose of this guide, we’ll be using MotionEyeOS (formerly MotionPie) to create our Raspberry Pi Night Vision Camera, as it is very slick, purpose-built and well supported. First thing you’ll need to do is download the image file from their GitHub site but make sure you pick the one relevant to your model Pi first.

Once downloaded, write the image to your SD card (plenty of guides available for this, so won’t cover that in here) and then pop it into your Pi. Before you fire it up, make sure you have an Ethernet cable connected to your Pi first as we’ll need to connect to the Pi to enable WiFi and connect to your network.

The first boot usually takes slightly longer than normal as MotionEyeOS, but when it’s all done you will need to access the interface via your preferred web browser. By default, MotionEyeOS uses port 80 so this means you only need to enter your Pi’s IP address in your browser and you should then be presented with the login page. There are a number of ways to find your Pi’s IP address, but I prefer using a Windows-based programme called Advanced IP Scanner as this is simple and quick to use. You can download it for free from their website.

When you find yourself at the MotionEyeOS login screen, the default username is ‘admin’ and the password is blank. You can change this in the settings yourself if you wish. If you don’t see the login screen, click on the the little key icon in the top-left corner.

Again, I won’t go into too much detail on the configuration here, as there is a great wiki page on their site, but in essence you will need to make sure your camera has been added and configured the Pi to use WiFi (including adding your SSID and password). You can overclock the Pi, tweak the camera resolution and much more. One big piece of advice I’d give is that once you are happy with your setup, make a backup of your settings (from within MotionEyeOS) and keep this somewhere safe. Therefore, if you need to do a reinstall, you only need to be able to login to MotionEyeOS to restore your settings from your backup. Very handy!

Once you are happy with your setup, you should have a fully-working, Raspberry Pi Night Vision camera! I connected my Lisiparoi so that when the Pi is powered, so will the Lisiparoi. However, you can add more sophisticated methods for this if you wish (i.e. via a button or GPIO control) – check out the Lisiparoi setup guide for more details on this.