I used a Raspberry Pi 2 due to the small form factor and minimal required accessories.

A simple Logitech C270 webcam was used to prove it was possible. I plan on using heavier duty, wireless night vision cameras for the final server

The Raspberry Pi is running Raspbian and using a program called Motion to run the webcam service. Initially, I found the webcam was drawing too much power to remain connected and streaming for longer than a few seconds.

To resolve this, I lowered the number of frames it captures (as it is for surveillance, it doesn’t need to be a perfect stream) .
It could be connected using a powered hub, but for this demonstration, I wanted minimal peripherals.
The service for the program Motion would end after about 45 seconds once the framerate was adjusted.

The camera would properly function if the service was manually started after being manually stopped. This was not ideal, as the system is designed to run headless (no/minimal peripherals)

To ensure the webcam service would continue to run, I set a cronjob (UNIX timed event. Think of it like a scheduled action that happens every X amount of time) to reset the service every minute.

Although this fixed the issue with the webcam turning off and staying off, the downside is when viewed in a browser, it would require a refresh.
But the upside is that the server was running properly! By using port forwarding (pointing a connection to a specific device within a network), the camera could even be viewed from an external device from anywhere in the world.

The webcam could be viewed from other computers on the same network, other computers with internet access, or from the Raspberry Pi itself.

Installing an Apache server on the Pi allowed it to self-host an HTML file. This was important to ensure a page could be opened without internet connection. But also to allow the site to be accessed from anywhere.

The HTML file hosted could either be fully coded on the Pi itself, or coded externally and transferred to it.

At this point, all that remained was to code a website that would display the webcam server from the Pi. Using iframe tags pointing to the IP address of the server and positioning them within a site seemed a good way to accomplish this. There was an early mockup that was going to use multiple iframes positioned either beside or on top of each other, but this seemed wasteful.

The downside is that the iframe would still react as a browser had and after the cronjob caused the webcam server to restart, the iframe would display a broken link. To resolve this, I wrote a script in java to refresh the iframe every 10 seconds.

The iframe properly would refresh as the service would refresh, giving a semi-steady stream for webcam. This can be improved to be a constant stream with the addition of external power to a USB hub, or a wireless camera.

The next step was to add weather. Using Yahoo weather APIs with some java proved to be useful in pulling the temperature by zip code. To position everything so it was centered and responsive, I used a flexbox display method to encapsulate everything and center it. This ensured it would work on a variety of screen sizes, and remain centered.

The raspberry pi was then mounted to the back of a mounted monitor and cable channel was laid to channel all required cables to the proper place.