dvarapala

Can you spot the CCTV camera in this picture?

That's great - can I press it remotely using a web browser on my Android smart phone?

And does far less. The problem with a fixed timer is it will close the garage door no matter what is going on. Would you want your garage door to close on you while you were in the process of unloading groceries from your trunk? Have fun cleaning up when the garage door squishes your jug of milk... Plus there's no remote control capability like the OP wanted.

all that is being pointed out is auto tracker does not work. BINGO. I'm as interested in the next guy in cool technology, but there was nothing impressive to me in that video. That camera was all over the place - like a pack rat, it would drop one subject (shiny object) as soon as it noticed another one. And the constant motion served no good purpose, only managing to be annoying. It's a fun toy to play with, but it's far from being ready for prime time, IMHO.

My wife forgets to close the garage door all the time, so I set up a system to allow me to close it remotely. To close (or open) the door requires nothing more than a simple relay; when the relay contacts are closed, it's exactly like pushing the button open/close button. I also have a garage door magnetic reed switch to sense whether the door is open or closed. I took an off-the-shelf embedded microcontroller board that had on-board relay outputs and opti-isolated inputs and programmed it to read the state of the door sensor and pulse the relay output on command to close the door. The embedded board is connected to a Linux server via an RS-232 serial port. On the Linux box I run a simple daemon which keeps in constant contact with the embedded board. If the garage door opens it starts a timer; when the garage door is closed the timer is stopped. If the (5-minute) timer expires, I get a text message on my cell phone telling me the door is open. I can then connect to my DVR and look at my garage cam to see what's going on. A button on a simple web page allows me to close the door. The embedded microcontroller board and the other parts cost roughly $150. I was already running the Linux box with a web server, so the incremental cost for those was $0.00.

Since it's a WiFi camera, you won't have any wires going to your router. Problem solved.

And only partially out of focus at that! I bought a (relatively) cheap Vivotek FD8134V to watch the side gate to my back yard. All was fine at first, but after a week or so I noticed that the image was blurry (except for the plants to the right, which are closer to the lens). This blurring (near-sightedness?) only happens during part of the day; at other times the focus is much better: The camera is mounted in a spot where it's in full sun during the morning hours; this period roughly corresponds to the time when the focus is most blurred. Presumably the sun is heating up the lens or other interior components, causing them to expand and shift the lens relative the image sensor. Am I asking too much of this camera to have it operate in direct sunlight? Note that the sun does not shine directly into the lens, so the picture is never washed out by glare. My Axis dome was in full afternoon sun for over a year with no issues.

Hmmm... So you chickened out and deleted your posts, but you're telling us to grow a pair? I do sympathize with your situation, though. If one of my neighbors was having punks visiting at all hours I'd not only be recording that activity 24/7, but I'd be calling the cops out to investigate as well. BTW, there's no need to inform the cops that you're recording everything with CCTV cameras. When you report a drug deal or whatever, just tell them that you "saw" the suspicious activity without going into detail as to how you saw it. That way you can hopefully avoid any questions of legality. In general, though, if it's happening out on a public street, in a front yard, or other location that is readily visible from a public ROW, there is no expectation of privacy and you can record anything that happens there. Good luck getting rid of all the douchebags.

Yep. Consider mounting the camera outside the porch. But don't expect too much from a camera that produces motion blur even during the daytime...

Follow-up: I finally got an opportunity to climb up on a ladder and pull the cover off this thing. Nothing obviously loose or broken, so down it comes and back it goes. I'll let y'all know about my experiences with Vivotek warranty service.

It's definitely a matter of preference and your individual needs. For example, suppose you were monitoring a parking lot for illicit activity at night. People pull in, park for an hour or so, and then leave; with motion-detection only, you'd capture the car pulling in and the car driving away, but you'd completely miss the hour of activity in between. You might not even know that these people were doing drugs, having sex, dumping trash, or whatever during that time because your CCTV system wouldn't capture it. You'd probably want to record the feed from this camera full-time. P.S. I live on a cul-de-sac also, and I record full time to make sure I capture every car that comes in and out. While most of the time I don't bother to look at that footage, if something ever does happen it will be extremely valuable to be able to review everything that was happening on the street at the time of the incident.

You won't unless there are errors in the transmission (i.e. dropped packets). It's all a matter of your tolerance. The longer the interval between key frames, the longer you may have a garbled image. The worst case scenario is you lose the packet immediately after a key frame; if your key frame interval is long, you'll be looking at a bunch of pretty colored blocks for quite some time before the next key frame comes along and snaps the picture back into clarity. Anyone who has ever had satellite TV can tell you how annoying that is. And you may have 2 seconds (or even more) of garbage. What you have to decide is whether or not you can afford to miss some sort of critical event during those 2 seconds. For example, a license plate capture camera could miss a vehicle entirely if the image were distorted for 2 seconds. For a really scary scenario, imagine what would happen if you lost two packets: one immediately after a key frame, and one containing the next key frame. You could be looking at garbage indefinitely if your packet loss is bad enough. OTOH, unless you're running up against the bandwidth limits on your network, lowering your bandwidth usage doesn't make any noticeable difference. For example, if you have a 100Mbps network, and you are currently using 7Mbps of that, lowering your usage to 5Mbps won't result in any noticeable improvements. Heck, if you have the bandwidth, why not run the camera in MJPEG mode? Then every frame is a key frame and you don't have to worry about this anymore.

For the last few months I've been playing around with a homebrew license plate capture camera setup. The "real" license plate cameras that I have seen start at ~$2000 and go up from there; I set out to see if I could come up with a combination of off-the-shelf components that would work well but cost much less. The camera I selected is an Arecont Vision AV1310DN megapixel IP camera, fitted with a Computar 25mm megapixel lens and an IR-pass filter that blocks visible light below 830nm, available from http://www.maxmax.com/aXNiteFilters.htm. The Camera is set permanantly in night mode, with the built-in IR-cut filter switched out. Mounted next to the camera is a Raymax RM10030C infrared illuminator, making it possible to capture plates at night. I set the camera to a fixed shutter speed of 1/500th of a second; this eliminates motion blur and allows the sharpest possible plate captures. The camera is mounted on a block wall fence next to my house, which is at the end of a dead-end street with a cul-de-sac. The angle between the camera and the street is approximately 25 degrees. During the day (with the IR illuminator off) capture isn't a problem: The exception is on very bright, sunny days, if the angle of the sun is just right, the LP is overexposed and washed out. I suspect an auto-iris lens would solve this issue, but unfortunately the AV1310DN only supports manual iris lenses. Capturing vehicles in the near lane is good enough, in most cases, to manually make out the plate number. This minivan is roughly 40 - 50 feet away from the camera: Capturing vehicles in the far lane is also possible under the right conditions. This car is ~90' from the camera: The angles vary because the vehicles are turning around in the cul-de-sac; if my camera was mounted more towards the middle of the block, it would have a better chance of capturing the exiting vehicles. Fortunately for me they have to drive into the cul-de-sac before they can drive out, so in most cases I catch them on the way in anyway. The cul-de-sac also helps to slow the vehicles down to a reasonable speed for blur-free plate capture. If I had it all to do over again, I would pick a camera with an auto-iris lens and adjustable gain (to help cut down on some of the noise in the picture during night-time captures). I'd also go with a camera that has remote focusing capability, or at the very least I would use a flip-top outdoor housing that allowed easier access to the focusing ring on the lens. The outdoor housing I bought is basically an aluminum tube, so once the camera is mounted inside there is very little space to reach my fingers inside to set and lock the focus. All told, this setup cost roughly half of what a "real" license plate cam would cost. And the learning experience was priceless.

What PoE switch runs from 5VDC? I'm considering something similar, and it would be very convenient if I could power a PoE switch off of the 24VAC that runs my enclosure heater and my Raymax.

That's going to be a challenge given the layout of my property. Any that are not a no-name brand, and that can honestly work at ~90' distances? I did the search and browsed through the results, but didn't see anything that appeared trustworthy.

Why do you ask? Are you planning a robbery or something?

I see what he did there...

True dat, although you have to be directly in front of the illuminator and looking directly at it to really notice.

FWIW, here is a capture from my RM10030C at ~90 feet: At that distance it's hit or miss, however. If the plate is facing the right way, I get good results, but if the angle is wrong, fuggheddaboudit. The camera is an Arecont Vision AV1310DN, fitted with a 25mm Computar megapixel lens and a filter that blocks visible light but passes near infrared wavelengths. Shutter speed is 1/500th. The angle of view is ~25 degrees off to the side of the street. Note that this illuminator is a "covert" unit (i.e. 940nm wavelength), so an 850nm unit should have about twice the usable distance.

Could be buffer overrun. On some DVRs, the threads that capture the video and save it to disk can get starved for CPU time and/or the disk I/O can take too long when other activities (such as purging old recordings to keep the disk from filling up) are taking place. Some of the captured frames don't get processed in time and wind up in the bit bucket. Did you check your system logs during the time in question? Any error messages in there?

I have always wanted one of these: http://www.mobotix.com/eng_US/Products/T24-IP-Video-Door-Station The ideal doorbell replacement.

I assume there were extenuating circumstances that forced you to sell your old system before you were ready to install your new one?

Yup, that's been my experience. Prepaid cellular service is kinda like a buy here, pay here used car lot: it's usually the most expensive way to buy, and only people who can't purchase any other way (due to lousy credit) will use it.

According to the link you provided, the camera is B&W: This probably means there is no IR cut filter (or the filter is removable under software control). Add some IR illuminators and you should be good to go.

The polarizing filter can work, but unfortunately it will require constant adjustment until you find the right angle to filter out the reflections. With moving cars (not to mention a moving sun) it's not going to be a very easy solution.