mike_va

Here are the innards of the 6 dollar unit. R5 looks like it shifted during soldering.

Look into how many pixels you will need to identify subject, and make sure you have enough light. Axis and others have good articles on this. Axis cameras come with built in pixel counters, others may also. Also you may want some PIR's for motion sensing if you want to know when it happens.

Another thought is that with the input and output ports you may be able to come up with something that switches the filter. There are some settings I think you can access directly. That is beyond what I know how to do with it however. Our house lights are on a timer, which is controlled by the Honeywell Vista 20P with 4204 relay cards. Some day it would be nice to control the camera settings also, like the IR filter. At least it switches at a sensible light level, unlike the CNB which tried to hold color a little too long.

Here is the paper delivery (not for us) this morning probably about 15mph (cropped screen shot) off Vitamin D. I am pretty much zoomed out on the 3.3-12mm, set at 1/30s. Is your scene completely dark maybe? We have pole lights on each house required to be on by the HOA. Motion lights that far out tend to annoy, I wonder if something like a CNB MIR1000 or 3000 would help? I have not tried them but there are some examples on the forum. The night performance of our system has been the hardest, even with the analog cameras (CNB, Bosch, etc). I finally came to the conclusion after a lot of testing that we'd need a fair amount of light no matter how good the camera was. I am a hobbyist, the pros here could probably weigh in. After trying a bunch of analog cameras and a lot of comparison and reading there I came to the conclusion that they are only going to get so good, and you are going to need light. Also a good lens helps, the P3344 I've since noticed is f1.4, the P1344 comes with f1.0. But even so, they all need light...

Wow, I did not see the 5-7K for the budget, you can get some nice HD cameras...I would not even mess around with analog cameras if you have that budget.

What I have done is a mix of megapixel IP and video servers/used cameras and Vitamin D software (love it and reliable, limits to 10fps). Axis P1344/P3344 used or even new occasionally on ebay ~ $400 Axis 241Q new occasionally ~ $400 ebay, $350 used. 241S/243 around $200 ea. Vitamin D $200 full license B&W cams sell cheap on ebay $2 ea, with good lux ratings 600TVL (get brand names) and varifocal lenses show up pretty reasonable also. So for $650-1500 you can get something that stomps a Lorex/Qsee/etc. Second the idea re motion floods.

Just for kicks here is the same shot set at 1/6s, although I have to agree it is not a very useful setting.

I also have a P3344 which is not terrible at night, I do not get the cars blurring. HOA requires everyone to leave on the post light in front of the house though which helps. It's happier with a certain amount of light though, tends to lose contrast otherwise and hard to make out facial details. I keep mine set to 1/30s min. Here is a pic of a P1344 megapixel f1.0 (temporary shot of the side yard, which gets a little light from the front of the houses) vs. an old Bosch f1.0. Both of these are through a glass window. Min shutter speed set to 1/60s for the P1344. Bosch: LTC0355 0.09 lux 50 IRE F1.2 Axis P1344: B/W: 0.05 lux, F1.2 (no IRE mentioned) In the backyard I have a P1344 also, which gets plenty of light from a flood and gives a nice picture.

I am playing around with the following setup: P1344 P3344 Axis 241S x 3 Axis 243 x 2 Axis 2400 (1ch) This goes through various switches finally reaching the computer running Vitamin D software. Surprisingly the computer although powerful 3GHz quad core has a 100 ethernet card. It seems to hover around 70% with everything cranking along. I am also running VNC to access this computer from a laptop. How much of the network utilization can I use reliably? I've not had luck googling this topic. Considering an upgrade to a 1GB NIC, but know at some point I will probably reach what can be written to the hard drive? P.S. Turning off the megapixels really helps drop this down, see attached pic (turned off megapixels and one 241S). I really like the 1344 but still cannot touch the old analog cameras unless there is some light at night...

Very cool, thanks!

Second this... with the added benefit that if you separate your remote access from your camera network, your VNC connection should be smoother. BTW, for a VNC app, I highly recommend UltraVNC along with their "mirror driver", which SUBSTANTIALLY improves the speed of live video over the remote connection. Thanks for the comments. I'll have to look into the mirror driver not sure what that is. Nor do I know how to seperate remote access from the camera network. Just a guess but maybe having that network seperate and then bridging to another network? Or adding two NIC's to the computer? Really I'm just guessing as I have no idea, I'll need to research this. Right now using UltraVNC on Windows 7, and Chicken of the VNC on Mac. I don't think I have dropped frames, from looking at the video. Not sure if there is some other way to verify this, I'm not a computer expert. This system is just something we are playing around with at home. The reason I thought it might be an issue is last night I saw one camera lose connectivity with Vitamin D intermittently. Have not seen it again though. Vitamin D might be a little processor intensive compared the the Axis, but I really like the way it saves events and filters by person or object. I really like the interface and how easy it was to set up email notifications e.g. when we get a package from UPS. Has ended up being somewhat humorous seeing who tosses it further the postman or UPS...

I was asked by a friend what DVR this was, as it looked not too bad. I though perhaps someone with more experience than myself (a hobbyist) could identify it from the time stamp format? It also records audio. All I can say is the pic looks a lot better than the lorex I had a while back... It's kind of cool, the sheriff has started posting home surveillance of people trying to break into cars. Thanks in advance for any help.

Note they may block loopbacks, maybe try from somewhere else? If you can do a DVR I assume you know about port forwarding etc. The way I do it is linksys router with dyndns, forward camera to port 10000 on router, access at http://yourdynaddress.com:10000/

One other thing you might look at is getting little more zoom to cover the truck. You have a nice overview of the street and stuff but if you can't get the resolution why bother? At least this is what we decided, and have progressed from Lorex (which was useless given the model I bought) to better analog's to IP. Obviously each step added cost and we are still playing around. We still use analog's some places, but they are really zoomed and on choke points (probably around 40mm in one spot). My favorite camera right now is the P1344, they are nice to setup too because they have a pixel counter (a little box that represent the number of pixels). But you can also ballpark this since you know your camera resolution etc. They have built in recording but after it fills it stops, so not that useful for me. They also have motion detect which overwrites, but you will likely need some light to get that working well at night.

Your HOA may be different, but ours allows floods. If you go to IR there can be focus issues unless you have the right lenses. I've played around with IR and decided except in a few areas around our house it is not worth the trouble (or expense). We are going to add motion floods to the front for that very reason, i.e. they look at the light when it comes on. Keep in mind you need a certain number of pixels to identify someone, I think it was 80 (on the face) or something like that if you don't know them. This is one area megapixels can help out, otherwise you are zooming in. And then you lose coverage unless you can guarantee they'll go through one spot. But with the megapixels you are still going to need light or it will slow the shutter down and you'll get blur. I've played around with the P1344 and P3344 Axis and they are decent especially once you add a little light. Try looking at B&W cameras with a good lux rating, these can be purchased dirt cheap off ebay. Like $2 a piece sometimes. I've had good luck with Bosch, but there are other brands. Point is with a better lux rating you can use less light, which might help with your HOA also.

Hobbyist opinion: We have an unfinished basement and have been running RG59 and Cat5E together. The only reason we are running coax is the cost of good IP cameras. I have no experience with baluns, and for what they appear to cost for a decent one it seemed easier to add the coax. If you are paying a lot to get the coax run we would skip it. The thing I wish our house had was spots built into the house for cameras (and illuminators for that matter). Aside from under the eaves, it would be great to have camera spots under the sconces on either side of the garage (for those people that like to take GPS's) and by the front door for package delivery. As it is we are going to have to make something custom to get all the coverage we want. We learned that we needed illumination even with decent low light cameras to get the resolution. You may want to consider shielded Cat5E. The only reason I mention this is we had a cheap Lorex camera at one point that interfered with some RF stuff (Honeywell transceiver). I don't know if there is any reason not to use it (aside from cost/hassle). Having said that we have unshielded Cat5E all over the place and have had no problems with the RadioRa lighting etc. However as time marches on your RF environment will become worse (due to switching power supplies etc). One last thought if you are running ethernet you may want to consider at least one everywhere you want a TV (Netflix/gaming/etc).

Thanks, I'll give it a try.

I made some measurements on my Trendnet POE switch. On Green/Green-White (pins 6 and 3) measures +44 with respect to Orange/Orange-White (pins 1 and 2), on a T568B connector. This seems backwards (polarity flipped) the attached pic from Wikipedia, although they also say that the polarity can be either way. I thought what I would do for one camera instead of buying another POE switch was just applying power to these pins since I have a few HP lab supplies sitting around looking for something to do. Has anyone done this successfully? I'm looking to do this with an Axis P1344. Thanks, Mike

On the P3344 the download function does work at least for events on the "continuous recording" or "recording list" window, using the download button. It may get resolved yet on the other problems I had, they are thinking it has something to do with where the camera is picking up the time.

I've been playing with the local SD for recording and it a little buggy on the 3344. The download function does not seem to work on the camera playback window. Also to view a recording I have to let it run a while, gives me error messages say if I start a recording and then a few minutes later try to play back a clip (that starts say slightly after the beginning). But anyway they are looking into it. They are expensive but they do have pretty good support. Clips play back in a window all right (using quick time), but if I download a clip I have to use VLC player (recommended to me by Axis). I wish it would just give me a file that would play in quicktime or windows media player, I never could get the latter to work on gave up on that once I got VLC working.

Here is a 23W fluorescent, supposedly equivalent to the incandescent. It has snowed since the last pics, but still nothing great. We both prefer the 11W LED overall. Hopefully after the holidays a whole bunch of IR illuminators will arrive and we'll see how that goes. (note: the camera has been repositioned slightly)

Thanks to both, will do.

Sort of. The losses in a switcher are low not because of the speed per se, this allows smaller magnetics etc. The losses are low because when it has voltage across the power device it does not have current, and vice versa. The losses occur during switching, and some copper and core loss. Switcher can run from the low 10's of KHz up to 1MHz and maybe beyond. The duration of the switching action will be very small however. I think it is easier for most people maybe to think of it as power in = power out (assuming no losses). For example, Pin=36V*0.1A=3.6W. Iout=Pout/Vout=3.6W/12V=0.3A. For a linear reg you are constrained to Iin=Iout, but you are correct you have to dump that voltage (loosely speaking). In the case of a linear reg the voltage is present at the same time as the current, so you have higher losses that you are stuck with. Hope this helps, I think I need a cup of coffee. We are wiring up another camera at home today... P.S. yep that is expensive electricity. I measured my quad core that I run Vitamin D on last night, that was in the 1.7-2A range...

OK I'm sensing a trend here... I started out looking at the Axis injector which I think was ~60. The TP-Link TL-PoE150S POE Splitter Adapter, I can get for the kind of money you are talking about. Kind of amazing that even comes with a power supply apparently. Not familiar with this brand though. Any suggestions on reliable POE injectors? Thanks for the help.

Yes, that is 36W it has to get rid of if it is a linear reg. There is a possibility they are just rating the current capability though, not power handling. But most likely that is a switcher. The power level you are talking about is so low either one would work fine.