Porch pirates are an ongoing problem as e-commerce grows in use, and the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated the use of e-commerce with stay-at-home and lockdown orders happening worldwide.
Porch piracy, wherein packages are stolen from the front doors of homes for personal or financial gain, went from a problem mostly dealt with during the holiday months to a year-long problem.
Following the theft of a package from his own home, YouTuber Ryder Damen developed what is believed to be a deterrent to these thieves with a Raspberry Pi-powered package security system using artificial intelligence (AI).
A camera is used to observe the porch in real-time and TensorFlow, an open-source software library, was used along with Python, a high-level programming language, to run the system on the Raspberry Pi entirely. The custom-built TensorFlow library works in tandem with the AI to signal the alert system.
The alert system not only launches blaring sound, but also squirts people with a sprinkler that is tied to the system. To top it off, the system coats the thief in flour on their way down the porch.
See Damen’s how-to with github.
