I’m getting closer to finishing the Kitty Cam.
This is a project I started because a couple of people in my area have lost their kitties, and are hoping to catch them again to bring them home so they can give the kitties the pampered lives they deserve (that's the birthright of all kitties, of course!).
I had been setting out game cameras around the yard for other reasons, which is why I refer to them as "critter cams" because I use them to spy on the critters that frequent my backyard while I sleep 
The critter cams did catch a glimpse of a cat that might be the one they lost, so they set out a live trap in the hopes of catching him. This meant we had to regularly check the trap because it's a very stressful thing for a critter to be stuck like that. My thought was that a webcam would make that job easier and less noticeable to any kitty that might be around. Plus if we could use a motion detector we could rescue the kitty as soon as he got caught.
So to start with I thought I'd try using the Raspberry Pi as a webcam, with a Pi-Noir camera - take a picture, upload it via FTP, and view it using a webpage. That turned out to be quite easy to do.
Then I added a motion (PIR) sensor, so that it would grab a picture as soon as motion was detected. Added to that I had it send myself a text message too 
. That was also quite easy to do, with a bit of fiddling required to set the sensitivity of the PIR sensor.
We went to Nanaimo (a city 1.5 hrs South of us) yesterday and were planning to come home late - perfect time for a Beta test!
So I set up the Raspberry Pi Noir camera with motion sensor for testing - throughout the evening I could use the website to see CharlieKat sleeping on the bed, and Linus up there later.
That little dark blob at the left side of the long white pillow is CharlieKat
We left a little salt-lamp on like kind of a night light, and that seemed to be just enough light - throughout the night the Pi_Noir camera was able to snap pictures, mostly of CharlieKat on the bed like that, occasionally with him looking at strange contraption at the other side of the room
Here's a picture of when I got home - that's me trying to save the webcam picture on my cell phone 
Because the PiNoir doesn't have an IR filter, the regular pictures appear a little on the purplish side, which is perfectly fine for this purpose.
The log file also recorded motion events properly, but needs to be adjusted to be a bit more sensitive.
For this test I turned off the text messaging, just in case something were to go wrong (I didn't want hundreds of messages coming at me throughout the evening!), but the log showed that it would have been just fine.
I need to make some minor updates to save motion-captured images separately, instead of always just overwriting the one web-cam file, and then I’ll build a little house around it to put it outside. I'll add a few LEDs into that house to help capture better pictures of the critters. I might experiment with IR LEDs instead of or in addition to regular white light, to see how the critters respond and how well we can see them.
Cheers,
-Nico