As discussed in my ealier post A Better Baby Monitor , we're now using Gonimo to keep an eye on Tiny at home. On the road we've been using our phones (one stays in the bedroom as a monitor, the other we carry with us as a viewer). This works OK for audio only or during the daytime where there's a fair bit of ambient light in the room, but there's no video feed at night. The infrared camera on the main unit is small enough to take with us when we travel, but the netbook with charger is quite bulky.

Raspberry Pi to the rescue! We can use the same USB IR camera and I added a small USB microphone to provide audio. The setup on the Pi is almost identical to the netbook - an LXQT desktop with the Chrome Browser/Gonimo set to start automatically. The only difference with the Pi is that I don't put it to sleep between naps (there's no power button to start it up again) and it's headless.

To manage the Pi I have to log in via VNC. There are only 2 tasks I need to perform, joining local WiFi and start/stop of the monitor. There's a chicken and egg problem here though; to connect to the Pi through VNC, it needs to be joined to the network. And while VNC is fine, it's a bit fiddly on a phone which is often all I have with me. So far my solution is to always bring my travel router and daisy chain the Pi through that (the router can be configured in a browser). I may try to find a way to control the Pi from a browser at some point in the future.