Let me setup this scenario:
You are selling your house.
You have small children. (Possibly 2 rug rats or more)
The real estate company calls and says they have a showing for your house between
the hours of 3pm-6pm.
You have to keep
the children occupied.
You realize this is
the 5th time you have shown your house this week.
What is a programmer to do?……Setup a webcam, find a motion detection software that has support to launch a program and of course, Visual Studio 2010.
First, comes
the tools
Some sort of webcam, I chose
the WinBook because a friend of mine loaned it to me. It is a basic USB2.0 camera that supports 640x480 without software.
Next up was find webcam software that supports launching a program. WebcamXP support this.
VS 2010 Console Application.
A cell phone that you can check your email.
You may be asking, why write
code to send
the email when a lot of commercial software motion detection packages include that as base functionality. Well, first it cost money and second I don’t want
the picture of
the person as that probably invades privacy and as a future buyer, I don’t want someone recording me in their house. Now onto
the show...
First,
the code part. We are going to create a VS2010 or whatever version you have installed and use
the following
code snippet.
Code Snippet
using System;
using System.Net.Mail;
using System.Net;
namespace MotionDetectionEmailer
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
try
{
MailMessage m = new MailMessage
("
[email protected]",
"
[email protected]",
"Motion Detected at " + DateTime.Now,
"Someone is in
the downstairs basement.");
SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient("smtp.charter.net");
client.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("mbcrump", "NOTTELLINGYOU");
client.Send(m);
}
catch (SmtpException ex)
{
Console.WriteLine("Who cares?? " + ex.ToString());
}
}
}
}
Second, Download and install wecamxp and select
the option to launch an external program and you are finished.
Now, when you are at MCDonalds and can check your email on your phone, you will see when they entered
the house and you can go back home without waiting
the full 3 hours. --- NICE!
