The Internet of Things has made it easier than ever to set up a smart home in which you can remotely control your door locks, lawnmowers, lights, thermostats, vacuums, and even pet feeders, using your smartphone and an app. It's also made it very easy (and relatively affordable) to monitor your home from just about anywhere with a smart security system.
Depending on your needs you can go with a system that you monitor yourself, or pay a subscription fee to have your home surveilled 24/7 by professionals who will contact your local fire and police departments when alarms are triggered. Of course, the more coverage you have the more you can expect to pay. Smart security systems are highly customizable and are available as full-blown setups that include professional installation and monitoring. But they all come at a very steep and high price ( more than 100$ to up to thousands of dollars)

But today we wanna offer you to find a way to build and secure your precious stuff or house in a more easy and cost effective way. This DIY Alarm system can be easily made using the components and devices which you can easily find in your house or can buy from your electronic store at a very cheap price. Inexpensive yet effective system. Remotely monitor and protect your home or get notified for any movement in your house instantly.

And the best part, you can have all this in less than 50$ !!!

This DIY is really great for :

Our DIY projects are specifically aimed to achieve these goals :


FEATURES OF SMART ALARM SYSTEM

STEP 1: NECESSARY COMPONENTS

STEP 2: SETTING UP YOUR PROTA SMART HUB

Prota OS is available on RPi B, B+ 2, 3. It can be downloaded for free from here. It’s only 3.8GB and easy to burn on a SD card (make sure to use a 16GB card).

Follow the instructions of Raspberry Pi foundation to write the OS image on your SD card. Extract the .img file from the zip in your SD card. Download and open Etcher, select the image and the drive and start the process.That’s it!
Screen Shot 2017-08-04 at 10.33.41.png

Once Prota OS is burned on the SD card, you can follow this simple installation guide to set up your Prota hub (less than 1 minute!). You only need to define its name and password, your time zone and your email address and the rest is completely automatic!

That’s it! Within 10 to 15 minutes and with no hassle, you transformed your Raspberry Pi into a Smart Office automation hub!

STEP 3: SET UP YOUR PIR SENSOR


As you can see, next to your sensor’s pins are small indications on what each pin is made for:

Simply connect as in the picture below to set properly.

For the quick explanation, the RED cable is connected to a 5V pin (PIN 02), the WHITE cable is connected to a ground pin (PIN 06) and the YELLOW cable is connected to GPIO04 (PIN 05).

You can look at the map below if you need any direction.

Now let’s open Prota Space.

The sensor is now set up.
Move your hand around, you should see notifications of “rising interrupt” on the GPIO app page.

STEP 4: SET UP YOUR WEBCAM AND TELEGRAM BOT

Using Prota OS, you can easily turn your webcam into a smart cam for monitoring with Prota OS!
It’s simple and setting up takes just one minute and just few clicks.

- Plug your old webcam
- Open App Libraries
- Download Webcam app
- Open Webcam app
Now that your webcam is turned into a smart cam, you’ll be able to get a snapshot from it whenever you want, by simply triggering an automation workflow that would take the snapshot and send it to you.


A Telegram bot is a virtual assistant that you can create on Telegram messenger app. You can use this app to receive snapshots for your office easily through the webcam app.

Your bot is now created!

Step 5: CONNECT YOUR PHILIPS HUE BULB TO YOUR PROTA PI

You can connect Philips Hue light bulbs to your Prota Pi to scare away a pet or signal blinking light effects when in case someone enters a particular area.

To do so:

Make sure your bulbs have been paired with your Hue hub beforehand. You can follow this guide to better understand how to use and pair Hue bulbs with Prota Pi.

Now that it’s paired, you can directly control your Hue bulbs through the app interface.

STEP 6 : TURN YOUR OLD SMARTPHONE IN A WEBCAM WITH MANYTHING

ManyThing is a web service that allows you to turn any smartphone or tablet into a smart camera by simply adding their app. You can also view a livestream and record particular moments when motion is detected, and since it is free for one camera, it’s a perfect service for our project!


Any phone that let you install this app can be used, and if it even has a frontal camera, you can make it film both sides, which is a great way to recycle your old smartphone!

Your phone will switch to camera mode and as soon as you press the red button it will start recording and live streaming.


Manything is connected to IFTTT so it will allow us to automate this camera’s use.

STEP 7: CREATE AND CONNECT YOUR IFTTT ACCOUNT

connect protaScreenshot_20170316-163241.png

We now need to use IFTTT, the platform that connects smart devices and web services together, to connect our old smartphone and telegram app with your Prota.

STEP 8: AUTOMATE USING STORIES AND CREATE IFTTT APPLETS

Now it is time to create all the automation workflows for this project in order for setting up various automation rules for your smart Alarm system!

The core challenge of a perfect automation is writing to have the right automation rules that will fit perfectly suit your needs and all possible situations. Prota OS provides you with a flexible and intuitive tool with Stories app where you can have all sorts of automation rules just perfectly suited to your needs. Combining Stories with IFTTT, it allows you to connect to hundreds of other services and devices together in many different ways.

For Alarm System, we will now create the following automations based on some scenarios:

  1. When PIR sensor detects a motion in a particular part of your house or specific location, send a notification to my cellphone and a snapshot of the room to Telegram Bot.
  2. When my smartphone camera detects motion, send me a notification to my Telegram account with a link to the video.
  3. When PIR Sensor detects a motion, Send a notification and Light starts to blink.
  4. Trigger an alarm when intruders have been detected.

1. When PIR sensor detects a motion in a particular part of your house or specific location, send a notification to my cellphone and a snapshot of the room to Telegram Bot.

This scenario can be used when you are away from your house and you want to set up a trigger for motion detection and get notification and snapshot to check.

Here is the Story Link.

2. When my smartphone camera detects motion, send me a notification to cellphone and  a link to the video to my Telegram account.

Next we set up story for getting notification on your cell phone instantly.
Here is the story link for it.

For this we also need to set up an IFTTT applet.

3. When PIR Sensor detects a motion, Send a notification and Light starts to blink.

This scenario can be good when you want to scare away your pet from a particular room or area or if there is a place in your house where there is dangerous things which are harmful for your children, then this scenario can be really useful for you. You can set up the blinking light for your that area and can scare away your pets as well.

Let’s start making the storyline.

Here is the cite link for the story.

4. Trigger an alarm when intruders have been detected.

Let’s say that the intruders have gotten to your house and you want them to get frightened as soon as some motion is detected. A good way to frighten them could be either to play a recorded message to make them think someone is present in the house, or to play an alarm sound. With IFTTT, you can trigger your phone to play alarm sound!

You can find many alarm sounds for free with a quick research. We recommend you this high pitch sound, highly disturbing! You can edit it to make it last a long time, or to add a vocal message.

Download it and put it on the old smartphone that you are using as camera. Make sure its name is recognizable, such as “High Pitch Alarm”.

For this we also need to set up an IFTTT applet.

STEP 9: INSTALLATION AND TESTING

Your smart Alarm System is ready. All you need to do now is to install your two cameras( Webcam and Old Smartphone) and the PIR sensor to start using your smart security system.

You can install each of the camera in different places or parts of your house as per your use and needs, keeping in mind their purpose.

To make it even more good, you can hide or mask these cameras as disguise so that the other people cannot notice it. The webcam can be placed somewhere high on the wall and the smartphone camera can be installed somewhere in the shelf.

This project can be customized as per your needs, depending on what you have at home or even at office and what use you’re expecting. For Example:

All it takes is your creativity and the applications of this endless and the advantages for this is priceless.

“Safety comes first. “

We hope this project should have helped you to understand how you can easily add smart alarm and monitoring system at your home and make your life more safer.

Do make sure to check out our previous Instructables to get more inspirational ideas.

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