In common with geeky new parents before and since, blogger Baby R’s Dad felt inspired by the imminent arrival of his child to make something to monitor all the sleeping he hoped the infant would be doing.

Aaah! Photo by Tamaki Sono / CC BY 2.0

It really spoils your enjoyment of the three-year-old Nordic Noir you’re finally watching if, on top of your partner’s commentary of, “I don’t feel like watching this,” “Why would anyone watch this?” and “I don’t understand how someone who has to hold my hand during Doctor Who can cope with watching this,” you have to deal with nagging worries about whether the baby you last checked on a full eight minutes ago is still slumbering contentedly. So I was interested to see how Baby R’s Dad, one half of blogging parent duo Stuff Babies Need, had approached the problem.

He uses a Raspberry Pi with a USB webcam and the motion package in a very simple set-up that gives you a live stream you can view from a phone or laptop on your local network. It also saves still images and video whenever it detects motion.

Baby R’s Dad supplies instructions that take you from buying a Pi and peripherals, through preparing your SD card, to viewing the live stream. A planned second tutorial that would extend the system to include things like temperature monitoring isn’t available at the moment; happily, though, temperature monitoring is an ideal beginner project that we’ve covered previously on the blog. If it’s your parents you need to keep tabs on rather than a baby, our Parent Detector resource has you covered, too.