Project Description

Includes a white paper as well as sample: firmware, driver, and application.

The white paper describes how you can build a simple motion sensor, a Sensor device driver, and an application that you can use to capture video whenever the sensor detects motion.

The sample firmware can be used to program a Parallax BS2 microcontroller.

The sample driver supports communication between a Windows 7 application and the sensor. (Note that in addition to a passive-infrared motion sensor, the driver also supports a compass, a 2-axis accelerometer, and an ultra-sonic distance sensor.)

The sample application demonstrates the use of the the use of Media Foundation to capture and encode video and Direct2D to preview the video stream. And, it demonstrates the use of the Windows 7 Sensor API to acquire sensor data.

The Sample Application

The Sensor Capture application is a sample application that uses a passive IR (PIR) sensor to trigger video capture from a webcam. The PIR sensor detects changes in the ambient infrared light, such as those caused by someone entering a room. When the sensor detects a change in the ambient infrared light, the application records a short video file. The application is written in C++.

Sample Video

The following video was captured by this solution.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjfJszbU9fM

The Sample Circuit

The sample circuit was created using the Parallax BS2 programmable microcontroller, the BASIC Stamp Homework Board, and the Parallax PIR sensor:

Project Resources

You can download the application source files and an accompanying white paper from this project's Downloads tab.

This sample uses firmware and a sample driver provided by Microsoft. To download the firmware and sample driver sources, see "Using Windows 7 to Monitor a Motion Sensor" on MSDN Code Gallery (http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/motionsensor).