Video surveillance kit based on Banana Pi

April, 13 2018

If you’re asking yourself, ‘How small can a compact video surveillance system be? CCTV server for less than $100 – is it real? Where can I buy an all-in-one server for my video surveillance?’ the answer is the Banana Pi kit. Banana Pi is yet another credit card-sized single board computer powerful enough for media and surveillance. Contact Banana Pi’s manufacturer and they will assemble a kit built around Banana Pi for you with parts of your choice.

Here are the approximate prices as of March 2018:

Banana PI M1 board – $30
acrylic case – $4.5
3M ethernet cable-$3
SD card 64GB -$29. Brand: original Sandisk
SD card 32GB -$15 Brand: original Sandisk

Thus, with a 32 GB SD card, the whole kit will be well under a $100 price tag costing as little as $52,5 ($66,5 with a 64GB card).

Get all the necessary parts, connect them to your Banana Pi board. Install an operating system to an SD card, and after that download and launch Xeoma (make sure to download the version for Linux ARM, not for regular Linux). Install Xeoma.

That’s it. Now you have a compact video surveillance system size of a small box.

Tip: need guidance on how to install an operating system onto a micro computer? Check out this sample guide on installing Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi.