Easy DIY baby crying detector with Raspberry Pi

In this instructable we will learn how to make a simple yet effective baby monitor that detects and alerts you whenever the baby is crying. We used Philips Hue as an alert system but you can choose a different item or channel to get notified.

Besides, while commercial baby monitors will cost you a couple hundred dollars, this one comes at the fraction of it and can be reused when the baby grows up! The problem

It is perfectly normal that new parents become a bit hypersensitive to their baby’s crying. However, for the first few months this can turn into an anxiety that drives you to the baby’s room whenever there is and there’s isn’t a problem. Baby monitor eliminates those instances when there is no actual problem. It reduces parental anxiety and let’s you focus on your time without scarifying the baby’s well-being.

This DIY baby monitor is widely compatible and can be accessed both on your tablet, smartphone or computer using a web-browser. In addition to the universal access, it’s a secure system since its audiovisual feed isn’t stored anywhere but streamed directly to you.

How it works

First, Raspberry Pi must be running Prota OS with Speech, GPIO and Webcam apps installed. We also installed the Philips Hue app because we have a Hue light bulb set up in our kitchen where we cannot physically hear our baby well. Thus, whenever the Speech app detects baby’s cry, the Hue in the kitchen starts blinking.

One last thing

The system can proactively attempt to put your baby back to sleep by playing the music whenever it starts crying. Since Prota OS is based on if this happens do that logic, it means you can set up the Volumio app to play a lullaby in attempt to calm the baby down when the sound detector picks up on crying. We’ll demonstrate how to do this in the last step of this instructable.

Step 1: Make sure you have the following items.