brian89gp

Depending on how close you are to the building and any line of sight options, a point-to-point wireless solution using something in the unlicensed spectrum an option?

If you do put a PC in the property, put it in the most hard to get, hard to find, and impossible to remove location. Any thief breaking in will happily steal an easily accessible computer...which defeats the purpose of doing all of this in the first place....

There appears to be a TFTP process built in to the u-boot that looks for a specific file upgrade_info_7db780a713a4.txt that may be another way of restoring without serial.

That looks like a MAC address in the txt file.

Don Stephens said:

MaxIcon said:

I wonder if they did this to get the heat out of the camera body. Several of the older cams I've used generated the most heat from the POE board.

 

As for the connectors, I just got a Hik 2332 from China, which had the mating waterproof connector and no big box on the cable. Manufacture date was 1/15 on the box.

 

I tend to believe the hype that it was all about making a cheaper camera. Seeing as how a lot of your cheaper IP cameras are coming with this train wreck attached to the pigtail now, I can't see them caring about longevity half as much as they care about shoveling as much product out as they can as cheaply as possible.

 

I'm also a "negative Nancy"

As sad as it is to say though, if I can get these for $80 a pop I'll probably still buy them and end up fussing around with adding a POE board, pigtail, and plug.

I wonder if they did this to get the heat out of the camera body. Several of the older cams I've used generated the most heat from the POE board.

 

As for the connectors, I just got a Hik 2332 from China, which had the mating waterproof connector and no big box on the cable. Manufacture date was 1/15 on the box.

Possibly, but the 4300s is only rated as 5.5w max draw and the 4800e is 7.5w. Hard to imagine that little of potential heat would cause issues.

I have a couple different POE boards on order from China that should be small enough to fit in these 4300s that I have. Contemplating putting an EtherCon style fitting on the end of a short 6-12" pigtail.

The POE box on the 4300S V2 cable has the 802.3af logic on it as well as a 12v voltage regulator. There are two feeds to the camera board, a 48v and a 12v and when plugged into a 48v passive injector both feeds are powered. The camera board runs off of the 12v feed, if I remove those two wires from the plug the camera board won't power on. No idea why the 48v feed is brought through to the camera board. Need to find a 12v power adapter and see if it energizes the 48v feed.

Red(+) and Black(-) are the 12v, Yellow(+) and Green(-) are the 48v, and the blue/orange/purple/brown are the two data pairs.

Has an unbranded (knockoff??) TPS2378 POE chip in it which the official version is 802.3at complaint.

I could live with one like the last picture, cable is still too long but it is manageable. I have one 4800E here that has that silly POE box on the cable. I am mounting these on brick walls and really don't have much of a place to hide the excess cable length and connectors. The junction box I am having to use to hide all of that cable is larger then the 4300S itself.

Any recommendations for a official USA reseller? I'm installing a couple camera's here and there and eventually will have around 20-30 of them, thus shopping around. Amazon was the safe trial run (easy to return....if I had saved the boxes....) I have a few outstanding orders off of AliExpress, waiting on delivery so I can verify them but from the sounds of it I likely will be getting the same V2 models.

Going to break open a 4300S tonight to see if I can't hide the innards of the POE box inside the camera and have a short 2-3" pigtail of a cable coming out of the camera.

This the "V1"? Know if they made anything else cheap on it, or just the external POE converter?

Amazon. Bought several over the past 2-3 months and they have all had it. Couple different sellers too. Crap, I already threw the boxes away.

So they normally don't have that thing and whatever electronics are in it are inside the camera instead?

Wait.... Is that thing the actual POE converter? They couldn't have put a the 802.3af power chip inside the camera!???!?

This is what the cables on all my Dahua camera's look like. Base of camera to end of cable is maybe 8-12" long. I would break out the wire cutters, soldering iron, and heat shrink tubing but that is a lot of effort if there are other alternatives.

Does anybody know if there is an option for it or even a way to custom order a different cable for Dahua camera's? In particular the IPC-HFW4800E and IPC-HFW4300S. I'm looking for a cable that comes out of the back of the camera only 4-6", only has the ethernet plug, and does not have that large rectangular plastic box on the cable. I mount the camera's to round junction boxes and keep all of the wiring inside the box, but it is hard to do with the existing cable pigtail as it currently is.

The Bosch Dinion Starlight 8000MP looks like a pretty amazing camera.

So, the Hikvision camera's have issues but the Trendnet does not?

Are the Hikvision camera's on longer cable lengths then the Trendnet?

What brand/model is the switch?

And are you able to confirm that it drops pings locally? Or only when going over the wireless?

Turn on logging on the Nanostations and attach the logs with the time of when the problem happens.

run "ping -t 10.0.0.147" to see if there is a pattern on the ping/no ping timeframes.

 

The "Active/Passive" is above my current pay grade... but I will dig in to it later.

 

Hopefully cleaning contacts tomorrow will resolve this.

 

Dunno if "Pattern" is too strong a word, but there is a certain repetitious nature to the Ping responses:

Get us the make/model of the switch and/or the make/model of the camera's. Chances are it is active POE (802.3af). From the latency I am guessing you are pinging from the Blue Iris server or some other computer at the server location?

Looking at the ping output there are a couple timeouts and then the destination host unreachable messages. The "Destination host unreachable" means that there is no route to the host, either on layer 3 IP or layer 2 ARP. Since you have a bridged network it more then likely is layer 2 ARP. The unresponsive timeframe is roughly the same which seems to be about as long as a camera boot time

My supposition. Due to cable length, poor cable, poor connections, or a bad switch, you are having your 802.3af POE power drop in and out causing the camera to reboot. The first couple seconds you get the ICMP timeout since the ARP entry still exists on the switch and after that it flushes and you get the destination host unreachable. Camera boots back up, ARP entry added to the switch, and all is good.

Active (802.3af) or passive POE?

Are you able to see if the camera has any sort of uptime/log that would help determine if it is a power or a network issue? 802.3af must negotiate POE and cabling issues affecting the power wire pairs can cause bouncing which will appear like the camera is continually rebooting. Wire issues can affect networking too

run "ping -t 10.0.0.147" to see if there is a pattern on the ping/no ping timeframes.

HP 1810G-8 (J9449a) is a POE powered switch. They are only POE powered though, they themselves do not provide POE power for further connected devices.

If you don't mind used or 10/100 port speed, the Cisco 3750 and 3560 24 port POE switches are in the $150 range. Most have 1gb uplink ports. Not a plug-n-play consumer grade type of switch though.

Not that I know of. The motion tracking does not have to be part of the same solution, and I've briefly tested it with iSpy Connect, for the purposes of helping that community with the commands needed to control that specific camera. It's free NVR software with a pay for features model and tracking is free, but it does track with iSpy albeit I've yet to see motion tracking with any product that intuitively does what you want. Basically they tend to follow the largest object with any analytic processing. The idea is you can have it track using one software and record with the other. iSpy also has an LPR add on for $50, but never tested it.

Ok. I'm going to have two Dahua 4300S camera's pointed each way down the street for the wide angle view, the motion tracking would just be nice to get a high quality full frame view of the action.

I'm going to be testing a IPC-HFW5200-IRA (7-22mm) tomorrow. My preliminary guess is that it won't work reliably if your plates are 80-100 feet away. Ours will only be mounted at about 8-10 feet up as well so the results may be a bit skewed for where you'll be mounting it but not by much.

I'll be happy to hear your results. I'm seriously looking at the PTZ that buellwinkle mentioned as it seems to meet all the requirements. My only concern is the size, trying to keep things low key.

If your are not doing LPR, then you can go higher resolution. At 100', you should look at the Dahua SD59230 PTZ. It has the IR LEDs to go that far and capture a plate. I show a plate at 200' in my review of the camera. Dahua has HLC for compensating for bright objects like headlights, reflective plates. It may be cheaper than a low light box camera + lens + IR illuminator.

Thank you, I'll give that a look. A PTZ might end up being quite useful too. I would probably set and forget but it would allow for re-aiming it without needing to break out the ladder.

Do you know if Milestone offers any sort of automatic motion tracking with PTZ camera's?

I am horrible at estimating distances. Distance to focal point is between 80 and 100'

When I am standing up on my front porch (eye level is 8' above camera level) I can easily read plates during the day with my corrected 20/20 vision, so I am hoping that the angles are sufficient enough for a camera to do it as well.

I will look at those box camera's and try and figure out if I can make them work.

Yea, sloping yard. 10' above street level is laying in the grass on my front yard and I don't really have anything to hide it in. Could I perhaps focus it further down the street to get a better angle?

As far as the low light capabilities, that relies on the lx rating in B/W mode and the dB rating of WDR? Bosch camera is .005 lx and 100dB, how would that compare to a .01 lx and 120dB camera?

Not planning on LPR, just a camera that can record a readable plate. If I do LPR in the future I'll probably also be able to afford going real high end on the LPR camera's and replace whatever I currently have

Here is a pic. Was thinking of a capture point near that front car.

Pic taken with my iPhone 5s, no flash. This is typical lighting.

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/t9te6OWyMc_8TW3OZNyUM_OjPUAK9cPSboUSBa21zvM?feat=directlink

Its an old neighborhood, houses close to the street, and I have a 6' retaining wall right along my sidewalk. 20' above street level is right about 8' up on my house. So unfortunately, the 20' height is not really possible to make any better.

There are street lights but there would need to be IR to supplement it due to shadows.

For now this is just to record video of plates. I use Milestone and if I ever go LPR software I'll buy a real nice camera to go along with that nice $1500 license...

I was eyeballing the Dahua IPC-HFW5200-IRA, up to 22mm lense. Probably not enough, but getting closer to usable.

I am looking for an IP network camera to be used as a license plate recorder. Speed of cars is <25mph typically. Camera will be approximately 20' off the ground and 50' horizontally. I am getting a laser range finder so I can more accurately give a distance.

I really want to stay in a bullet or dome style camera style. I like Dahua and would like to try and stay under $400 for the camera.