Suggest the possibility of DIY home security systems a decade ago, and most people would probably have thought of Kevin McAllister's booby-trapped course of swinging paint-tins and electrified doorknobs in Home Alone. Indeed, visual, auto-detection and information technology was, at the time, something only lettered professionals could really muck around with (and was, even then, notoriously glitchy and unreliable).

But right now, we're in an age where hardware crashes are rarer things. Computers are tougher, and are used as control hubs for countless robotic technologies, of which detection, recording and media-storage are some of the least logistically challenging. Setting up a DIY home security system is really not something to be intimidated by - home security camera systems can be constructed from the simple webcams people use to chat online, and, for a little more money, infrared security cameras can conquer issues of lighting and motion detection in the gloomier parts of your home.

You should keep in mind, before you get too caught up in building a DIY home security system that turns your home into a hi-tech fortress, that the most effective form of crime prevention is really simple common sense. More than half of all burglaries occur as the result of negligence - someone leaving a door or window open, or forgetting to put the alarm on. Make sure that your spouse, children, and any other residents of your home are set in the ritual of locking doors whenever they leave, even if it's only to run a quick errand.

On from this, you'll want to install contact sensors on all your windows and doors. Contact sensors are simply two pads which, when in contact, complete an electrical circuit. If that circuit is broken by, say, the opening of the window, a switch will trip in the contacts, causing them to signal to their central hub (which, in the case of a DIY home security system, would probably be your personal computer). Contacts can be purchased for less than ten dollars at most hardware stores.

If you've decided to rig up a full-fledge home security camera system as part of your DIY effort, you could arrange your contacts in such a way that they'll activate your security cameras, setting them to record as soon as the circuit is broken. For DIY home security systems, there's no reason to get anything more sophisticated than a webcam to act as your security camera. These can be had for under $20, and are widely available in department stores and through computer supply chains.

Going infrared, by contrast, can be a very costly business. While the cameras are down from their 1970s pricing (which had them at around fifty thousand adjusted US dollars) those available from FLIR, the pioneering infrared security camera company, still bottom out at the, some might say, prohibitive price of $2000. The benefits of infrared security cameras are, however, definitely not something to be sniffed at. They can record detailed, high quality footage even in complete darkness. This they do by the use of microbolometers, which read off the black body radiation of objects (which, relating to heat, is something humans and animals have a lot more of than, say, furniture or walls). Integrating infrared security cameras into your DIY home security system would also eliminate the need for smoke sensors and, by rendering your home security camera system immune from changes in atmospheric conditions, bring it firmly into the 21st century.

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