buellwinkle

Most IP cameras, cheap or expensive have web servers built into them. So you expose the port to the internet via your router and you create visitor/guest userids that are allowed to view the camera live. The only camera I've used that don't do this is Arecont. There's limitation of about 5-10 users per camera. The other alternative is to have the IP camera ftp an image to your website and then put the image on your website. For example, I put an image every 5 minutes for my community of our park cameras. With this, you can have lots of people looking at it.

I record what they refer to as events to a NAS. You setup zones on the image where you want motion dectection or you can use can use the IR sensor on the front of the camera. You then tell it how many seconds before and after the detection to run the video and it stores it on the NAS as an event so you can view later. I get funny looks when I tell peope about storing video before motion has been detected. It's because it's constantly getting images in memory, but writes the events from memory, not from the image sensor.

For that large an area, you need a good camera. We use the Mobotix M12D-SEC Day/Night. Here's an image from last night (no special lighting, no IR lights, just available light) -

Being on the customer side where I'm brought in as a consultant to review bids, I have to see all the specifics and I tell them up front, I don't want you to bid generic cameras with generic specs, I want detail like it was going into a contract. I have to see what they are going to install, it's part of the SOW. I had projects go bad when they vendor spec'ed Sony cameras and installed chinese crap with Sony sensors. So all the stuff is pulled, vendor loses money on labor, customer loses a month of no cameras. So it's a fine line between giving them too much info where they can shop your quote and making it too vague where it leads to dissatisfaction. I never shop quotes, but that doesn't mean others don't, just part of life.

This is one reaon I don't like Arecont. They send the entire video stream and let the software sort it out. You have a 3MP camera, sending 15 fps, wow, you will saturate a 100baseT (what the camera works with) with just a few cameras. You can use gigabit switches, but it's waste because these cameras don't support it. This is why I'm sticking with Mobotix M12, all the logic is in the camera, it sends a low res image to the PC for display purposes and then logs events in hi-res to a NAS, then the PC is only used to configure the camera and view live events.

Cheapest camera's with motion detect, that's easy, just about any chinese made IP camera. For example, at home I have a wifi camera that's not connected to any computer. When it detects motion, I have it set to email me a short video. I can also have it FTP the video somewhere or write to an SMB mount point. Check out a camera called Foscam. There are many clones, but if you pay a little more, like $90 you can get the real deal. What's cool is you can have it ftp events out, no PC required and you can connect from your cell phone to watch the live video. Also, in a small room, it will work in total darkness with it's built in leds. Check ebay and search for foscam. The picture quality is pretty good and you can interchanges lenses. I ordered a lens from dealextreme for $6 shipped that's extreme wide angle (2.2mm) and the picture quality is sharper than the factory lens. Don't get me wrong, you asked for the cheapest, not the best, so it's nothing I would use on a project but fun nonetheless.

One thing is you can go with a camera that requires no software, all you need is built in, like Mobotix. Then you only need the Mac to view the camera and events through a browser. I think Mobitix even has a Mac version of it's software. Also, have you considered VMWare Fusion. I run it on my Macbook with a couple of operating systems depending on what I'm doing. For example, I run Vista, SUSE Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux so I can run the apps that I need to run. It works surpisingly well. One example is that you can run a Windows program by just clicking an icon for it and it will boot up Windows XP, start that program and all inside of a window. At the same time, you can run all your favorite OS X software. You'll probably need more memory but that's cheap these days.

There was one company assembling a Mobotix M12 with battery pack and hard drive and poe switch that you can just charge up, put it up somewhere and it would work for a week or so with no wires. So to do this more permanently where there is no network access, you would need a AC to power a PoE switch and nas drive and put them in weatherproof box if it's outsde. A 1TB NAS drive is pretty cheap and hold a lot of events, maybe months depending on your use. If you are just worried about a network outage, that's not a big deal, like griffonsystems said, it will hold a lot in it's built in SD card until the network is back up, probably days worth. Is the problem that you can't wire the camera up because of distance or costs? You can go with wireless bridges.

There is a good high spot towards the back of the park I thought about putting a 15-20' pole. That would be a fear in using traditional WiFi bridges, where you may get problems with people's home and small business routers. I see that they also make a 5 ghz system, that may fair better and one reason I was looking at Avalan, but Ubiquity Nanostation 5 seem to fill that role and look to be inexpensive.

Forgot to mention, the scale is 1" = 300'

Here's a map of the area. The terrian varies by about 200' from low point to high point. The park is somewhere in the middle with the stuff above it on the map about 100' higher, and the stuff below about 60' lower. The heart of it is a 5 1/2 acre park where surveillence is key to reducing drug sales and vandelism that happens (typical teen gone bad stuff) and it's mostly at night. The DSL, PC, and 2 Mobotix M12D cameras are at the pool and that's our starting point. Also being installed is a key fob system around the park (pools, tennis courts and pedestrian gate). This is all easy to implement, had them do all trenching yesterday so it's all hard wired. The places shown with the arrows are drive through and pedestrian gates where we want additional cameras, maybe 2-4 at each gate for plate recognition and overall shot of the area to capture an event. Also, the pedestrian gates will have a key fob reader tied to the controller at the park. www [dot] buellwinkle [dot] com/gallery/camera-map-1 [dot] jpg

Good to know, always looking for more cost effective solutions. I see they use traditional wifi, but with clearly more power and better antennas than my home wifi router. Our problem with wireless is that many of these are line of sight and we have houses & hills inbetween. Will this work across those obsticles, but shorter distances? For example, we would need to bridge about 1/2 mile, or 1 km but in hilly terrain to have cameras at various entrance points to the community. Even if we put up a 20' pole to mount this on (like on top of a light pole), the hills are about 100' high in between. Also, say it can't make it past the hill, can we put 2 on a pole at a high point to acts as a repeater for 2 at the 2 low points?

Sorry, I had to post 5 times and wait 5 days before I can send a legitmate post, forums rules. I appologize for the clutter. I would recomend Avalan outdoor bridges. They can span 30 miles line of site, are cost effective (under $1,000 USD for the pair) and are popular with IP cameras. The biggest cost may be the poles needed to mount them that have power to run the bridge and the camera of course. You'll also need a power injector for the PoE and a weatherproof exclosure to hold this. I would attache a link but I have to wait 4 more days per forum rules. So just Google AW5800xTR and you'll get information on it.

I'm trying to port forward to allow external access to the camera so that Blue Iris can implement this camera as a supported camera. I can certainly understand your needs, high frames per second is nice to have, but not a high priority for me, about 5fps is all I need for the level of security we manage. Clearly there's a balance between fps and storage costs. Also, consider the lack of audio, to me that's integral to my security needs. Their software leaves a lot to be desired. For the type of security I use for community protection, I need something more sophisticated than what their cameras and software provide. I'm sure if I spent some time looking for the idea software for this, I can make it work. It certainly works with Milestone Xprotect. The reason I looked at Arecont was their 5 MP camera, something Mobotix doesn't have, and certainly not Axis and cost. But costs diffrences are quickly eaten up my Xprotect license fees, lens, external housings and the lack of audio support.

I've been testing an Arecont camera and frankly, I just don't get it. This is truly one small notch above a CCTV camera in terms of features. I have an assortment of IP cameras and this is the least functional of them all (an I'm including $100 ebay specials from China). PQ is good, I give it that, but the camera needs a PC to run, this is rediculous. I have Mobotix camera running, writing to a SAN, no PC invoved at all other than viewing. I have inexpensive IP camera sending video and pictures to FTP sites, no PC involved. These cameras have no way to write directly using FTP, SMB, nothing. You have to send the video to a PC and then use that to write. I've just never seen anything like it. But lets say a featureless camera is a good thing, here's my technical gripes. It crashes IE8 all the time, consistantly, won't work on Safari, Firefox is the best bet. I make configuration changes, and no matter what I do, it doesn't take. It has a DHCP option, but it still forces you to have a static IP and I need it to be DHCP for my router's port forwarding to work.