A prototype motion-activated security camera I’m running caught some lightning.

I have slapped together a prototype security camera made from a $35 Raspberry Pi and a $25 Pi Camera Module. There is some simple image capture software running on the Pi itself and Motion a software motion detector, is running on a server. The software running on the Pi turns it into a standard streaming Motion JPEG IP Camera and Motion accesses the images as it would from any such camera with an ethernet connection.

This is straight forward and commonly done. Some people run Motion on the Pi directly, but in the intended application there are multiple cameras and I thought it’d be easier to manage the collected data at a central point rather than let multiple independant cameras spray data at a file server.

For reliability testing purposes one such setup is randomly pointed out a window into my backyard to act as a source of random motion.

We had a thunderstorm recently and these images were caught:

As lightning pictures go, there is nothing here of note. There were quite a few other flashes captured, but none of the actual lightning bolts appeared within the small region of the sky that happens to be visible to the camera. Lightning wasn’t intended to be part of my tests.