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).
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
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?
Would be better off making it a webcam
where’s the $25 bucks camera?