Pushover Alerts for Motion Detection with RPi Web Cam Interface

~ quavoce

UPDATE – Pushover has its limitations such as not being able to send photos and having to pay for the service. A better, free!, alternative is Telegram. For instructions, please see my tutorial here: https://quavoce.wordpress.com/2017/09/29/telegram-send-messages-photos-animated-gifs-from-your-raspberry-pi-and-rpi-web-cam/

This post describes how to use an online push notification service called Pushover to send you notifications on your mobile devices whenever an event occurs. In this example, we are using it with the excellent RPi Web Cam Interface (http://elinux.org/RPi-Cam-Web-Interface) to send you a message whenever motion is detected.

If you would like to create a secure HTTPS remote access to your cameras, be sure to check out my other post here:

  1. Signing and Setting up Pushover
    1. Sign up for an account here: https://pushover.net/login
    2. Make a note of your “user key” (copy it into a text editor for example)
    3. Select the Apps & Plugins link
    4. Click Create a new Application
    5. Give your app a name, and choose Script within the Type drop-down menu
    6. Tick the checkbox and press Create Application
    7. Make a note of your API/Token key.
  2. Install the Smartphone App or launch the desktop client
    1. Links to the apps are on the Pushover website under the Android, iOS, & Desktop link
  3. Create a script on the Pi
    1. At the command prompt, cd to the macros folder (substitute html for the folder you specified during setup)
      2. cd /var/www/html/macros/
    2. Create a start_vid.sh file using your favourite text editor (nano or vim for example – the latter of which needs to be installed using “sudo apt-get install vim” – nano is easier if you don’t know vim)
      3. sudo vim start_vid.sh
    3. Paste the following bash script into the file:
      4. time=`date +"%d-%m-%Y %T"`
url="https://<MyDynamicURLorIP>/mycamera" #no trailing slash after html
cameraName="myCam"

filename=${1##*/}
thumb=`echo $filename | awk -F "_" '{ print $2 }'`
thumbname="v${thumb}.th.jpg"
sendurl="${url}/media/${filename}.${thumbname}"
streamurl="${url}/media/${filename}"
livestream="${url}/min.php"

curl -s \
  -F "token=yourAPITokenKey" \
  -F "user=yourUserKey" \
  -F "device=DeviceNames" \
  -F "message=Motion detected at $time. Live video Link: ${livestream} - Recorded video link (need to wait until recording has completed): ${streamurl}" \
  -F "title=Motion Detected from $cameraName" \
  -F "url=$sendurl" \
  -F "url_title=Click to open a still image showing detected motion" \
  https://api.pushover.net/1/messages.json > /dev/null 2>&1
    4. Save the file and the change the permissions so it can be executed
      5. sudo chmod +x start_vid.sh
      sudo chown www-data:www-data start_vid.sh
    5. Test it works
      6. sudo ./start_vid.sh /var/www/html/media/vi_0003_20160818_092213.mp4
    6. This should send a push message to your phone with a link to thumbnail for the above file (which obviously won’t work for you unless you already have a video with the exact date and time as above) 🙂

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