Remotely controlled SpyCam with nodejs and telegram

In this article you are going to see how to create a spy camera with nodejs and telegram that you can use to capture images over the internet , so lets start :)

Create a Telegram Bot

go to telegram and search BotFather

now if you click the menu you are going to see "create new bot" option along with some other options

hit "create new bot"

now you have provide some name the bot and a username for the bot

you will receive token and bot link in return , securely store them for later use and do not share them publicly .

Create a node project

you now have to create a node project , go to the directory you want to store you code in and hit

yarn init -y

now lets install some dependencies

yarn add dotenv node-webcam node-telegram-bot-api

create a .env file in your project root , with TELEGRAM_TOKEN , MY_TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID , ACTIVATION_TEXT variables

put the secret token that you received from BotFther in TELEGRAM_TOKEN , set ACTIVATION_TEXT , MY_TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID is to make things more secure you will see how to find it below
(you can also work without chatId , there is a github link for that at the end of the article)

getting MY_TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID

// main.js 
require('dotenv').config()
const TelegramBot = require('node-telegram-bot-api');
const { TELEGRAM_TOKEN} = process.env

const bot = new TelegramBot(TELEGRAM_TOKEN, { polling: true });

bot.on('message', async (msg) => {
    const chatId = msg.chat.id;
    console.log({chatid})

});

if you run this code with node main.js and send a message in your bot channel ( bot channel can be found with token message from BotFather ) you will get your chatId , you can now set it in MY_TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID in .env file

Taking pic from webcam with node

you are going to use the below code to take pic with node from your webcam

// takePic.js 
var NodeWebcam = require("node-webcam");


const takePic = async () => {
    try {
        return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {

            var fileName = Math.random().toString().slice(2, 8);

            var opts = {
                width: 1280,
                height: 720,
                quality: 100,
                frames: 60,
                delay: 0,
                saveShots: true,
                output: "jpeg",
                device: false,
                callbackReturn: "location",
                verbose: false
            };

            var Webcam = NodeWebcam.create(opts);

            Webcam.capture(`${fileName}`, function (err, data) {
                if(err) reject(err);
                resolve(`${fileName}.jpg`);
            });

        })


    } catch (error) {
        reject(error);
    }

}

module.exports = takePic ;

now that you have everything in your .env set up , you can now modify your main.js like this

var takePic = require("./takePic");
require('dotenv').config()
const TelegramBot = require('node-telegram-bot-api');
const { TELEGRAM_TOKEN, MY_TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID, ACTIVATION_TEXT } = process.env

const bot = new TelegramBot(TELEGRAM_TOKEN, { polling: true });

bot.on('message', async (msg) => {
    const chatId = msg.chat.id;
    const { text } = msg;
    try {
        if (chatId == MY_TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID && text == ACTIVATION_TEXT) {
            bot.sendMessage(chatId, 'wait');
            const filename = await takePic();
            const url = `${__dirname}/${filename}`;
            bot.sendPhoto(chatId, url);
        }
    } catch (error) {
        console.log(error);
        bot.sendMessage(chatId, error);
        bot.sendMessage(chatId, 'an exception occurred');
    }

});

now run main.js node main.js , if you now send the activation text in your bots channel (hear it is "snap" , set in .env) you will initially receive a reply with "wait" followed by a Picture captured from your webcam 3:D .