Dan The IOT Man

Raspberry Pi 3 Night Vision System built using a Raspberry Pi 3, 7″ Raspberry Pi Touchscreen Tablet, a Pi Night Vision Camera, 32GB SD card, and an Anker battery.

The video shows the NV system in action in three separate environments:

• Inside a house with all the lights turned off
• Outside on a country path at night
• Inside a barn at night

The range of the IR LED’s is about 15-20 feet, so indoor locations seem to provide the best results. Even in the pitch dark, you can clearly see everything in a standard sized room.

Like this Kitchen:

The build was fairly simple. The System just runs Raspbian and Python Picamera scripts to operate the camera. I used a standard record PiCamera script that creates 30 second video clips and just added the ability to Time Date stamp the output files.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import datetime

import time

date = datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%m_%d_%Y_%H_%M_%S")

import picamera

with picamera.PiCamera() as camera:

    camera.rotation = 180

    camera.start_preview()

    camera.start_recording("/home/pi/Desktop/video/"+ date + "video.h264")

    camera.wait_recording(30)

    camera.stop_recording()

    camera.stop_preview()

The IR LED do seem to run fairly warm when run constantly, so using a record script that turned them on for a limited time worked out very well.

Overall the build was very easy, and with using Python Picamera scripts, very easy to control. The nice thing too is it is still a fully functional Pi Tablet, so you can use it for other things when not using the Night Vision.