mike_va

The other problem which is a PITA is that the new LED's high power surface mount even at 940nm give off a red glow...

The old 5mm 940nm devices had a tighter spread on wavelength and were not visible.

VitaminD is phenomenal if you want to know what is going on and get useful notifications, and/or don't want to spend your life reviewing footage each day...

I also run other VMS recording continuous, don't know if they work with USB devices.

No, I think we are saying the same thing essentially. I have been fighting a bit of a migraine today...

Thanks, but I'm not talking about image latency, I'm talking about loading and rendering the setup interface.

No prob, but the setup interface is also provided by the camera server.

Another thing I've found is that at night, the web interface on the camera is painfully slow. I think it is trying to deal with the large dark area and the camera's CPU just can't keep up.

At night the bandwidth will be greater, especially if there is not enough light. So the camera's server is perhaps struggling.

I have installed a maybe 20 or so Acti cameras and I have no desire to sell or install them anymore. They have been reliable but quirky to setup and configure. I have also had 2 of them default to factory settings on their own and as you can see the night time performance isn't the best. Also not a big fan of the look and design of some of the cameras.

One was enough for me, periodic artifacting and also a reset. Luckily was able to return...

That is not a good picture at all, but for some reason the leaves are OK in the upper right. Is the IR pointing to where the person is?

I have a similar problem with a blacktop driveway, took a while to dial in. One thing that can help is adjusting the AGC down, if you have excess light. That does not look like this problem though.

Found this while browsing YouTube. Not as bad as some of the examples here, but seeing all those wires draped willy-nilly all over the place just makes me cringe.

That video was done by a very active & helpful member here who did a first time CCTV install for his home. Actually not bad for a first time DIY job in my opinion.

I'll second that. He also provides some much needed perspective and with the tight shots actually has better coverage where needed than some of the "nightly news" shots. I'll take usable shots over a few temporary wires anytime...

Yep, if you have light not too bad at night. On it's own it is nowhere close the others. Colors drive me nuts during the day though with no ICR...even the wcm is not that great. Bosch WZ16 has a nice day pic, but no OSD.

From those pics, they don't look bad at all. Are they dome cameras? I'm looking for a dome camera.

CNB has a dome w IR that is not bad can't remember the model

Here's a few more pics, I think the wz16 may have had a loose connection or something but you get the idea

I did not have good luck with the WBL20 at distance. WCM is a good camera, as are WZ16 and even some cheap qsee we have. Pics attached are camera IR only, dark otherwise.

add a transistor, driving a relay (diode across the coil). you can probably buy a small board with all that stuff on it somewhere.

that gives you a contact closure. you are not "directly" controlling the motor.

parallel the relay contacts across the switch

we use the sensors in our alarm system also to prevent the system from being armed at night with the doors open.

hope this helps

while you are out there screwing around you might want to add alarm sensors to the garage doors, I think it would not be too hard to get into houses that way...we added some like this

Thanks razer.

 

I do not have an exacq-built server. I built my own; it's a dell poweredge. However, I think my cameras have alarm outputs. I have an Axis P3346-VE and a P3367-VE. I also have a Vivotek 8161.

 

So, if these do have an alarm output, would I just run a wire from the camera to the garage door opener? Would I need a diode? Is the voltage the same?

 

I'm new to alarm outputs and triggers, but *very* well versed in electricity and computers

Mine is just contact closure. I have several systems that can open the garage door, but have not tied it to a camera (yet...)

Don't know about exacq, only played with it briefly but you can have the output show on the 3346 liveview page, or add button that maps to an http command. You can also make a different button put it on your phone and have it send the http command.

Generally, CFL cannot match IR since IR is a tighter angle usually 30-60 degree output which helps greatly. PAR CFL's aren't bad, we use one out back. Have it switched with an X10 timer, X10 pro switch.

We have normal CFL's on the side of garage 2x ~30W ea to get our 3MP camera enough light, 8W white LED on side garage for some analog cams, Raytec and Bosch elsewhere. Would prefer to run IR on the front, just because I can get near 100 yards with my units, but believe it or not the red glow was actually attracting people out checking car doors at night up our driveway...we garage our cars...someday will build something truly covert but unfortunately the only LED's that are truly covert and don't glow are the 940nm 5mm units which don't put out that much...

The MP lenses are worth the expense, even more so with a 3MP camera.

I've tried one standard lens that looked good on a MP camera, the rest looked so-so.

Lenses really need looking at carefully. Especially if using with IR, some make the image look like it does not have as much contrast.

I think the average person gets concerned about megapixels, whereas crappy lenses, firmware/hardware issues and limited dynamic range (and/or poor exposure) should also be considerations. Similar to a very good DSLR vs. a cheap point and shoot...

Man, what a hassle. Would not be surprised if they are up to something...

My neighbors like me having a camera. I send them videos of people checking for unlocked car doors in the wee hours...now one of the neighbors is asking what it takes to get a system like mine.

Some pinhole cameras see well with low light, KTC has one B&W that is pretty good. Good at close range anyway, and for overview.

I have a 528 which was $300 on sale at Costco with 4 cameras (not bad cameras either). So, not that expensive. Updated the firmware a while back, which did work. The catch to that is I cannot access any longer on an old mac 10.5...

Update: reactivated the license per their instructions and back to normal.

I could have, but they said this was normal operation and I was not happy with the construction. In my mind took some unacceptable shortcuts with the adhesive attachment of the power devices to the heatsinks. Works fine now but after thermal cycling and absorbing some humidity they just don't hold up. There are also some solder splashes remaining from the original assembly.

With some of the cameras on there I really don't want to have to replace them if something goes bad. Hard to beat Lambda linear supplies for quiet and rock solid reliability.

Pretty expensive new, that came from work where they sometimes fill the dumpster with perfectly good stuff...also how I ended up with ten HP and Tek scopes in my lab...

It seems unlikely the camera is 600mW that would be 50mA. Probably more in the range of 3-6W. My cameras with the least draw with no IR are around 100mA or 1.2W.

It's called "pixel based" motion detection. Your DVR is looking for the pixel to change state and it doesn't matter what causes pixel to change rain, snow, clouds, shadows....

What you are looking for is called analytic based motion detection where the system analyzes the video feed for humans, cars, boats.... Your system can not do this so you would need to change your DVR encoders and build a small server to support the analytics.

 

 

Check out this video

 

 

http://www.vitamindinc.com

VitaminD is phenomenal. I cannot imagine having a system without it. Accurate enough that I have no problem sending pics to my cell phone WHEN there is a person in an area for example. Fast and easy to review other events that are captured during the day. I do run other software non-stop recording though, since it does not do audio and is limited to 1.3MP although can be used with some 3MP cams. The other thing that is rarely mentioned is that you can save months of clips on a 1TB drive. Anyway...

Not that hard to add to an existing system, pick up a used Axis encoder on ebay 241 or 243 usually around 100. Or use one channel of an old 2400 quad encoder around 50 used. Actually you could use 4 channels of the 2400 if you limited the capture to 320x240 per channel to keep the frame rate up on the encoder.

My honeywell vista 20p does that with the bidirectional remote w audio, if you tap a button for status. I imagine they have a panel with voice. Maybe check out the 6150V.