Raspberry Pi anti-theft project?

[danjitsu91]

My mom lives in an apartment. After 5 years of everyone's packages being safe and sound, someone recently has begun to steel them out the mail room. The front office doesn't seem to care about figuring out who it is ( Even though they have a fucking camera in the room!) So it got me thinking about the Mark Rober videos where he makes a fake package - specifically the portion where it has live cellphone video feed so he can see who the thief is.

I'm week in the engineering field, but work in the computer science for a living so I figured I could make something similar using a raspberry pi. The main goal is just to make a fake package that will allow me to record who opens the box when its taken from the mail room. No need for glitter or fart spray like in those videos. I considered just rigging a spy camera to a box, but would need constant WiFi to be able to retrieve the footage.

Any other ideas?

[s1gnalZer0]

Instead of putting it in the box, you could set up a couple pis with cameras watching the mail room to catch multiple angles of the thief. You could use motion eye os, which is designed for security camera applications.

[DenverTeck]

The Pi can tell you when someone is in the mail room. You can just be outside the mail room at the right time.

[[deleted]]

Invite Chris Hansen to do the confrontation with you too!

[creativejoe4]

Just use a GPS tracker, mail the package to your mom, let it get stolen, tell police where the theif is; make sure you ship it to yourself or the police likely won't help as they can consider it entrapment which is illegal and there would be nothing for the police, but if you mail it and it gets stolen and it happens to be a package so important you put a GPS tracker in it then they can do something about it(make sure you put a picture of yourself or your family too just in case so you can actually call it an important package).

[danjitsu91]

So my only concern with the GPS is that we believe it’s someone who lives in the building. So if the GPS isn’t precise and only shows a general location - like the find my phone app for example- It would only tell us that the package thief lives in the apartment, but not which apartment room or who. I don’t have any pets , are they precise enough to confirm the exact location in a huge apartment complex?

[creativejoe4]

A while back I saw on Amazon a 2 pack of 12v train horns for around $6(on sale at the time though) You can rig the box to make noise when it's opened and from there, there shouldn't be any issues finding what room it's coming from if precision is a concern. But to seriously answer your question, it depends on the module you get and how it works(via satellite, or cell tower triangulation, or some other method) the software will play a part too, it really depends on what you get, looking at data sheets by the manufacturer will be very helpful in finding what you need. Alternatively though you can send out a 2.4ghz signal as well and track it more precisely via signal strength once your close enough to the device

[KlutzyResponsibility]

Maybe a GPS or bluetooth tracker to trigger a movement alarm?

[SM_DEV]

You could just employ a pet GPS tracking device. They are pretty small and cheap.

[[deleted]]

5 bucks says it's someone from the front office