Build Your Own Surveillance with old phone and motion/motioneye on Android Openwrt
If you have some old phones collecting dust in a drawer somewhere, don’t sell them for a fraction of what you bought them for. If they still turn on, you can put them to good use in your home.
You could turn one into a baby monitor or a makeshift Google Home speaker, etc. One of the most useful ways to upcycle an old phone is to make it into a home security camera.
1、First install the IP camera APP on the phone, so that you can use the phone camera for video surveillance


There are several issues in video surveillance with mobile phones alone:
- Mobile phone SD card space is limited, unable to store a lot of videos
- The mobile phone SD card has a limit on the write cycles. Frequent storage of video files on the SD card will damage the SD card
- There is no unified management portal if you have several mobile phone
- Cannot access the network surveillance video from the internet
But if you use Android Openwrt together, you can get the following benefits:
- You can manage and browse multiple mobile phones camera in a unified interface
- The video can be saved on the USB hard disk connected to the set-top box
- You can browse the network surveillance video from the internet through frpc
2、Use a browser to access the Android openwrt motioneye web management interface, the address is http://xx.xx.xx.xx:8765, xx.xx.xx.xx is the ip address of Android openwrt







Here is a video clip recorded by motion when activity was detected.
If you want to send an email notification after the activity is detected, you can configure the activity notification, as shown in the figure below:

And with frpc you can access motion video surveillance from the internet.