With a rear-facing car seat, you can’t see the baby from the driver’s seat. So I mounted a webcam and a small Raspberry Pi on the back-seat headrest.
- When the engine starts, the camera turns on its own Wi-Fi. Connect the phone, open a browser, and the video is there. No internet or app is needed.
- At first it took 1 minute 36 seconds to start. I turned off boot steps that aren’t needed in a car and got it down to 26 seconds.
- Video is recorded continuously in 1-minute clips. When storage passes 70%, the oldest clips are deleted first. The Raspberry Pi has no clock battery, so it takes the time from the phone when the phone connects.
- The picture broke up every few seconds. I found the cause by removing parts one at a time. The camera sometimes sends a cut-off frame, and recent Linux kernels passed it through to the screen instead of dropping it.