“The Octocam is a nice simple project which is easy to get up and running. Using the instructions on Pimoroni, assembly took about ten minutes and I then flashed the MotionEyeOS onto a new 16GB micro SD card and was away! About the build: The nuts and bolts are plastic so will only tolerate gentle finger-tightness - this makes the base stand fairly unstable and liable to spring out as it is held by pressure alone. The Octo-board does bend slightly so I would also advise trimming down the spongy spacer before fixing it to the back of the camera module if needed. The camera is poor in low light conditions (but maybe Pimoroni can add some IR LEDs where the Octopus eyes are for Octocam v2...). The software: MotionEyeOS is like a well-featured CCTV system, however it is not very flexible for adding your own scripts additional hardware etc - I would recommend installing raspbian OS and then installing MotionEye (not the OS) on top. However, even with MotionEyeOS, I managed to set the motion notification to run a curl command to blink my Hue lights when motion was detected - pretty neat!”
“Great little kit.
Quality is superb. Kit came with everything needed for the project (except SD card and UK plug. it does have USB cable for power)
Also comes with a sheet of cool stickers
Using the online instructions, kids built and installed the camera.
We built it for sticking onto the window. Also works as a desktop camera too using supplied stand.
We now have another discreet motioneye daytime security camera for the garden
Will be purchasing another.
Would be nice to have an IR option for the kit too, with IR LEDs and noIR camera for 24hr monitoring (maybe LEDs can be on a separate board that connects to octocam)”
“Been itching to assemble something useful based on a Raspberry Pi as part of a weekend project and am nothing other than impressed with the beautiful way in which Pimoroni bundled their OctoCam kit together and the image quality from captured photos and videos using MotionEye OS. Absolutely no experience with Raspberry Pi needed to assemble this kit however with Pimoroni professional results almost guaranteed. Cannot recommend them enough.”
“Been itching to assemble something useful based on a Raspberry Pi as part of a weekend project and am nothing other than impressed with the beautiful way in which Pimoroni bundled their OctoCam kit together and the image quality from captured photos and videos using MotionEye OS. Absolutely no experience with Raspberry Pi needed to assemble this kit however with Pimoroni professional results almost guaranteed. Cannot recommend them enough.”
