Baby monitors give parents piece of mind by letting them keep an ear (or eye) on a kid’s room while wondering the house. But you don’t need to spend a lot of money on a high-end model to get decent performance.

Matt Karr decided to build one himself using little more than a $35 Raspberry Pi and a Blue Yeti USB microphone (which, admittedly sells for around $100 — so buying a baby monitor might be cheaper… but not as geeky).

Raspberry Pi baby monitor

You can find instructions for setting up the baby monitor at Karr’s website. In a nutshell, you just need a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian Linux, a supported USB microphone, and a few lines of code that allow you to capture audio and send it to a remote source.

Then you can use a second Raspberry Pi or any computer running Linux to monitor the incoming audio, allowing you to hear if your baby’s crying.

via Raspberry Pi

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3 replies on “Raspberry Pi + USB mic = baby monitor”

  1. This is brilliant! I love all of
    the possibilities of applications for the Raspberry Pi. I’m actually
    considering a few myself. I run a USB microphones site and am interested in
    putting together an all in one pocket studio. I’d love to utilize the use of a
    raspberry pi, but I’m not sure it’s going to deliver the processing power I
    need. I’m kind of wondering if there are any other suitable micro-computers I
    could use for my project. I’ve not really done too much research on the subject
    yet.

    I know that the pi is cheap and
    that’s partially what I’m going after. Would you possibly know of any similar
    computers that would work for my purposes?

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