Building a CRYPTO FLOSS DIY babycam

In order to monitor your babies (or whatever you wish) and there is some old hardware available you can easily build your own CRYPTO DIY FLOSS babycam. All you need is:

• a raspberry pi (3b in my case) and corresponding gear (sd-card, powersupply)
• the raspbian operating system (with LXDE, not the lite version)
• a usb camera
• a ssl-secured jitsi meet instance where you can create rooms without password

Install the raspbian and boot it. You need to enable ssh. Login via ssh and install XRDP:

sudo apt-get install xrdp

Login to the rdp session on the pi (e.g. with remmina or any other rdp client) and open the chromium-browser. Open your favourite jitsi website and create a new room with a complex roomname so nobody can access it accidentially. Rooms with password won’t work as passwords are not transferred via url parameters so autologin is not possible. Allow access to camera and microphone.

Now take the shell and edit the lxde autostart config file:

sudo vi /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart

Attach following line and change it to your needs:

/usr/bin/chromium-browser --disable-restore-session-state https://your.favourite.jitsi.server/averycomplexroomnameformybabycam

Save the file and reboot your pi. The pi should now be starting with jitsi automatically after powering it on.

If you want to turn off the babycam you could just kill the power supply with risking a damage to the data on your sd card (never happened to though).

Alternatively shut the pi down before switching it off through Raspi Check available on F-Droid.