If you have an old webcam that is no longer being used because you've upgraded to one of the best webcams, like one with tracking, you might wonder what you could use it for. After all, it's a camera and can do much more than simply show your face during conference calls. Well, with a little bit of work and a low-cost SBC, you can put that old webcam to work to protect your home, the environment, or your 3D printing hobby.

5 As a home security camera

Keep a watchful eye on the inside of your home

Having an always-on surveillance system in your home is a wise investment, but can be an expensive one. But if you've got an old webcam and a Raspberry Pi board, you can roll your own internal security system, including motion detection triggers for video clips and the ability to take still images at any time. You can use pretty much any Raspberry Pi model to do this, and even an old webcam will give enough image quality to set things up. It's all thanks to MotionEyeOS, which is a customized operating system for the Raspberry Pi. If you've got the latest Raspberry Pi 5, you'll have to build things from scratch, but it's still doable if you follow our guide. You can mix USB webcams, IP cameras, and even the Raspberry Pi camera module if you have them, making it simple to stretch surveillance over your space.

4 As a document scanner

You don't need a scanner anymore

Not everyone has a scanner at home, and there will always be a time when you need to scan a document in Windows 11. Maybe you need to sign something and upload the document, or want to digitize copies of important paper-only documents just in case. That old webcam you have in the drawer might not be the best for full-color video calls, but it'll be more than enough for scanning black-and-white documents. All you need to get started is the Windows 11 camera app, which has a built-in scanning option that will save the scans to your Camera Roll.

Or, if that isn't enough, you can use PowerToys to use OCR to pull text off of documents that you've already scanned, so you can copy and paste them into blank documents, ready for editing. That's pretty powerful, and that old webcam is all you need to get going.

3 To watch your 3D printer

All you need is a SBC

Unless you've got a premium 3D printer with advanced features like Wi-Fi control and built-in webcam monitoring of your prints, you might think you're out of luck. But thanks to the 3DP community, there's an easy way to get remote control and monitoring of your printer, and it's called OctoPrint. This handy software runs on an SBC like the Raspberry Pi 5 and opens a whole world of 3D printing monitoring.

Ever wonder how those time-lapse 3D print videos were made, where the print head always looks like it's off to the side, but the printed part keeps getting bigger? This is how by configuring the OctoPrint to take the snapshots "on Z change," so it'll get the images while the tool head is moving to the next layer. If you've got more than one old webcam, you can feed several into OctoPrint with the MultiCam plug-in, and monitor the progress of your prints from several vantage points while recording time lapses from each. It's one of the best things you can add to any 3D printer, and an awesome way to reuse an old webcam.

2 To snitch on your pets

Keep an eye on your fluffy friends

Ever wonder what your pets are up to while you're not at home? Well, with an old webcam, a Raspberry Pi, and a little bit of tinkering, you can set up a pet surveillance system that doesn't just record their antics but adds a documentary-style voiceover as well. While the whimsical nature of narrating your pet's lives is fun enough, it teaches you about LLMs and how AI vision detection works and we all learn better when being entertained.

This project can be used for more than just using AI and an old webcam to give your cats an internal monologue. You can also use it for bird watching and have it email you a summary of what avian friends visited in your yard, scare away raccoons from your trash cans, or remind you to water your plants when it detects them drooping. Having email notifi-cat-ions is a fun way to use an extra USB webcam.

1 As a wildlife camera

Capture those cute critters on camera

Here's a neat use for your old webcam that also benefits the environment. Scientists combined a Raspberry Pi with the Raspberry Pi Camera Module to create a system for automatically counting bees as they go into and out of their hive, but there's nothing stopping the same system from being created with a larger Raspberry Pi and a USB webcam. Keeping track of the buzzy bees business' helps protect one of the most important pollinators, as it can indicate if there's something in the local environment around the hive that's causing a population drop. If you don't have any beehives to track nearby, you can track cats in your garden, so you know which of the feline felons is digging up your flower beds at night.

These are just a few ideas to reuse that old webcam

If you have a spare old webcam lying around, it can easily be turned into something more useful if you feel like starting a project. These are only a few of the many things you could repurpose that webcam for, but it's a good start to get you thinking of options. Even cheap webcams have enough resolution for any of the things on this list, so the only thing you might need to pick up is a relatively inexpensive SBC to host the project on.