The Christmas Present Peeker Trap uses an ESP32 Cam board, photoresistor, buzzer, and connected app to catch even the sneakiest of gift glimpsers
Here's a project for makers who suspect that they have a Christmas present peeker in their home.
Are you a maker and suspect that you have a festive sneak‑a‑looker in your home? Well, the Makerinator has returned with the perfect project for you, dubbed the (Christmas) Present Peeker Trap. In brief, it’s a couple of microcontrollers, connected to a camera, photoresistor, buzzer, and software stack to send SMS, save video to the cloud, and serve a video of the dastardly peeker, wrapped nicely in a dedicated app.
I Built a Trap to Catch Christmas Present Peekers - YouTube 
The idea is cunning, but you have to think like a fox to catch a fox. In simple terms, when a present peeker opens a gift box to glance at its secret-til-Christmas contents, the light entering the box hits a photoresistor. This triggers a series of events to record the guilty party and send an alert and a video to the Makerinator’s mobile app.
In practice, it took several days of frustration, fiddling, and tweaking on both hardware and software fronts of the maker equation before everything worked as it should.
If you watch the video above, the Makerinator will walk you through the Present Peeker Trap creation process, from selecting the initial components and coding, to adding more components and coding again, to quashing wiring bugs and coding again, before testing the trap.
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It turns out that the original plan of simply using a single microcontroller and cheap camera sensor wasn’t viable. Thus, subsequent iterations of this project swapped out the camera to one that was capable enough to show a face without a full set of studio lights shining directly at it. Moreover, the ESP32 Cam board alone was too puny to handle all the work, so Makerinator added an Arduino Nano clone to handle photoresistor sensing and buzzer functionality.
During a demonstration, which we strongly suspect didn’t feature the real Mrs. Inator (or Santa), the finished Christmas Present Peeker Trap worked as follows:
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- Mrs. Inator can’t resist Christmas parcel peeking, so she opens up the Christmas Present Peeker Trap box that was left unattended.
- The photoresistor sensor reacts to the flood of light and sets off the buzzer.
- A text message is sent to the Makerinator’s phone.
- A ten-second video clip is recorded, saved onto a microSD card, and uploaded to the cloud.
