node-red Security Camera Project for Raspberry Pi

• to have a couple Raspberry Pi constantly taking home security photos.
• uploading the photos to cloud-based blob storage service; I ended up with AWS but Azure Blob Storage Node worked nicely too.
• to persist the image only if it has a quality worth keeping (ie. no black images at night).
• to purge old images; prevent the system from just filling up the drive.
• to save some operational information; to confirm the system was running correctly.
• gather statistical reporting numbers; tallying the storage being consumed.

• Raspberry Pi w/ Camera Module
• Python PiCamera Module
• ImageMagick Software Package
• Node-Red
• Amazon Web Services Account
• (optional) Splunk for Operational Reporting
• (optional) Datadog for Operational Reporting of the Custom Vision AI

• Python script takes photo every 30 seconds and saves it locally to Pi drive.
• Node-Red flow watches the pictures folder for changes.
• Prior to saving the image to AWS S3 cloud storage the ImageMagick "identify" application is called in order to process the image's "blackness" value - if the image is too dark it will not be saved.
• If the image quality is good the flow saves the photo to AWS S3 blob-storage.
• S3 policies move older photos to Glacier storage to save on costs; an additional policy will purge/expire the images from AWS.
• In parallel to the save operation the system saves operational metadata to a local Splunk infrastructure.
• The Node-Red flow also has a sub-flow that periodically deletes old images from the Pi and saves the details to Splunk.
• A new flow has recently been added which once every hour takes the most recent image and runs it through a custom computer vision AI algorithm which has been trained to identify "normal situations" at my house.
• The output from the computer vision AI is saved to Azure Table Storage for future analytical processing.

The Node-Red project is on GitHub