Janek Kozicki's Journal: tiny surveillance system

Today when going back home I took a shortcut through the forest near the city. And I was stalked by two men who wanted to rob me, but with some luck I escaped. Many people are going there to take a stroll because in overall it is a nice forest, so it is scary that it is so dangerous. I reported the incident, but I could only describe how bandits looked like. Police said that this certain place is a good spot for bandits, and that such incidents can happen there, even though they are patrolling this area quite often.

Since I'm not going to leave things like this, I have an idea to put some tiny surveillance system inside a bird house. I looked at tiny SBC systems. But nothing really appealed me. I'm looking for a very small linux stand-alone system, that will have just one USB connection to plugin a camera, and enough memory to store three days of video (preferably flash or RAM memory). Basically I want to monitor this area and capture possible incidents, in a similar manner to this one. To capture images I plan to use motion from sourceforge. I plan to visit the camera every few days and download data, but since this place in the forest is just 700m away from my flat, some real-time wireless data transmission would be nice too - if power consumption will not be to high.

Of course later, when I will capture bandits in action I'll post a followup story so that slashdot crowd can enjoy.