I have been playing around with Motion on one of my Linux boxes, and got annoyed at the constant stream of emails that I am receiving as I have setup Motion to send an email to myself when it detects motion, so I wrote up a short script to activate or deactivate motion if it can pick up certain devices by pinging them.
It’s not foolproof as my wifi is playing up a bit and some devices do not respond by ping sometimes, but it’s useful for deactivating something when you approach and reactivating it when you leave, or vice versa depending on your use of this script.
Setting this script up as a cronjob will allow it to run every say 5 minutes for automation.
#!/bin/bash
PeopleAround=0
people=( 192.168.2.72 192.168.2.117 )
MotionStarted=`wget -o getlog -O /usr/scripts/status http://localhost:8080/0/detection/status | cat /usr/scripts/status | sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g' | tail -n 3 | head -n -2`
for ip in "${people[@]}"; do
PersonAround=`ping -c 1 $ip | grep '64 bytes' | wc -l`
if [[ PersonAround -eq 1 ]]; then
PeopleAround=1
break
fi
done
if [[ $PeopleAround -eq 1 ]]; then
if [[ "$MotionStarted" =~ "ACTIVE" ]]; then
wget -O /usr/scripts/status http://127.0.0.1:8080/0/detection/pause
echo "People around, stopping motion" $run | mail -s 'Motion stopped' YOUR@EMAIL.COM
fi
else
if [[ "$MotionStarted" =~ "PAUSE" ]]; then
wget -O /usr/scripts/status http://127.0.0.1:8080/0/detection/start
echo "No One around, Starting motion" $run | mail -s 'Motion started' YOUR@EMAIL.com
fi
fi
11 Responses to “Script : Activating / Deactivating Motion if device appears or disappears”
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Hi and thanks for your really useful guide to getting Motion running. Like you though, I’m getting lots of emails, so have tried to implement the script above. I’m a real newbie, so here’s what I’ve done:
Created a script called ‘motion_check_nearby.sh’ and entered your script above. I’m pretty sure I’ve entered it correctly, adjusting only the email address.
The problem is pretty early on though. Running (sh motion_check_nearby.sh?) gives me an error:
motion_check_nearby.sh: 3: motion_check_nearby.sh: Syntax error: “(” unexpected
So I’m guessing (again, newbie) that line 3 defines a variable called people, type list?, but the shell script is unhappy about the bracket. I’ve checked the script and can’t see any other issues, such as where the values of people is checked in line 8, but can’t see what I’m doing wrong?
Also, do the permissions need to be changed on the script? ./motion_check_nearby.sh fails to run (does the #!/bin/bash declaration at the beginning indicate you should be able to run it by ./motion_check_nearby.sh?)
Thanks in advance for your further help.
BR, Adam.
Permissions need to include the execute permission.
Can you paste the offending line ? Make sure there’s no spaces between the bracket and =
Also, big thanks for the massive donation 😀
Sorted it – me being a numpty and putting a comma in to separate the values in the list 🙁
Now this error:
wget: missing URL
Usage: wget [OPTION]… [URL]…
Try `wget –help’ for more options.
cat: ./motion_check_nearby.sh: line 7: http://localhost:8081/0/detection/status: No such file or directory
/usr/scripts/status: No such file or directory
sed: option requires an argument — ‘e’
Usage: sed [OPTION]… {script-only-if-no-other-script} [input-file]…
Incidentally, I have to connect to 8081 to see the stream from motion, despite not changing the default port. However, changing all references in the script to 8080 yields the same result.
Can you paste the first wget line in the script ?
By default, port 8080 is the management pages, 8081 is the webcam stream.
MotionStarted=`wget -o getlog -O /usr/scripts/status http://localhost:8080/0/detection/status | cat /usr/scripts/status | sed -e ‘s/]*>//g’ | tail -n 3 | head -n -2`
That didn’t translate properly when I transported it to the PC for posting. I’ll post a link to a screen grab in a second
No problems 🙂
Out of curiosity, did you copy and paste the script from my blog post ?
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bw1E9wMNR1_ueHVVeVV6NEpMNXM/edit?usp=sharing
No I didn’t c&p because I’ve not worked out how to without the formatting going all wonky. I suppose if I booted the pi into X, and browsed to midori… but getting time with the Pi on a screen is a problem when the kids want to watch Pokemon.
hmm That looks ok to me…
That second argument – that is a -O <-- capital 'o' and not a zero right ? can't quite tell with the fonts.
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