Dee_Ann

HELP!! I have an iCatch 4ch DVR, it's the 411L model, I assume it's been discontinued because I can find NOTHING on google for this thing. Somehow the stupid thing has changed the password and locked me out. I tried the default password of admin/123456 plus a dozen plus variations of the password I KNOW I set it to and have been using for almost 2 years. I can only conclude that someone has hacked it and taken control of it from remote. I've looked on the back of it and I can not find a reset button like most little devices have, IE a WIFI router. Most things have a button you can press and it resets it back to factory settings. I've tried to log into it through the web interface and through the local UI via the mouse. It simply will not let me in, period. I have to assume the worst and now I believe I have no other option than to do a hard reset back to factory defaults. Can someone PLEASE help me?? Thanks...

Hi, Ok, this may sound paranoid and kooky but this is what I need. I need a CHEAP, SIMPLE little home IP camera that will work stand alone within my own home WIFI, BUT does not require an account of any kind nor requires a connection to the outside world of any kind. I just want to be able to view it on my iPhone over my WIFI only when I'm within my own home and never outside of the home and as a bonus, if at all possible, be able to call it up on my Roku and view it, again only within my own home WIFI and it never, ever having any connection to the outside world in any way. Here's the reason. I wired a garage door opener to my coffee pot so that I can lay in bed and press a key fob remote that triggers a relay that electrically "presses the button" on my coffee pot to start it as if I was standing there pressing the button. Furthermore, I also wired a very, very loud alarm/siren on the same circuit to give me audio feedback so that I can "supposedly know" that the coffee pot was triggered and has started. The coffee pot is downstairs and it's pretty hard to hear the siren if the air conditioner is running. Now this in theory should work 100% fine and probably about 90% of the time it does work perfectly. But sometimes depending on how I am holding the button or the humidity level or my mood, or who knows, sometimes the signal is not good and the relay downstairs will toggle on and off rapidly, I'll hear the siren go on and off rapidly several times but then I have no way of knowing if it was toggled on or off and I just have to HOPE that it actually stayed on and is brewing. When this happens it's almost certain that it's not. I can try to second guess it and press the button again but it may cycle a few more times or maybe just once but after the first malfunction it's purely a throw of the dice as to if it started or not. This to me is extremely annoying so I want to get a really cheap little IP camera that I can put in my kitchen facing the coffee pot, when I wake up I can bring up the camera on my iPhone or my Roku (which is connected to the TV in my bedroom) then while watching the coffee pot I can press the button and see if the blue light goes on and stays on so that I can press the button a second or third time or how ever many times I need to to make sure the coffee pot started. Of course the first thing everyone will say is "Why don't you just use the built in timer on your coffee pot you goofy woman?" Well, I can't. I'm afflicted by non-24 which means my internal clock is like 32 hours or so. Every single day of my life I go to bed at a different time and wake up at a different time. EVERY TIME. Your wall clock, 12 noon is always at the top and the hands always rotate at the same speed. So for you 10pm and 7am are always at the same time for you. For me not only are the hands of my clock rotating at a different speed, the face of the clock is also rotating as well so that my "noon" is 2:30pm today but tomorrow it might be at 4:45pm and so on. I stay up 20 to 22 hours and sleep 5 hours at a time to further complicate my life. I can't change that, it's how my body works. So I can't use daily timers or alarms or even calendars for that matter. So for me the only thing that really works is to have a way to trigger my coffee pot from remote when I wake up so that by the time I get dressed and get downstairs my coffee is ready. I've got that part made and working and it's usually OK but not always and then I get raging furious and curse a lot when I go downstairs and find the coffee didn't start. As for the camera, I do not want one that requires you to create an account of any kind, anywhere. I don't want one that requires a connection to the outside world. I don't want one that uses ANY outside service, cloud, server, etc.. I need it to operate as a stand alone IP camera that functions only within my own private WIFI at home, that I can view with a generic IP camera viewing app on my iPhone and even better via a generic IP camera viewing app on my Roku. I've tried to dig through Amazon for one but it seems that no such thing exists but if there is one, there is no way to search for an IP camera that meets the criteria I require. I do not trust the internet, I do not trust "the cloud" or external servers, I will not, under any circumstances put any type of camera system online an in any way or form. It seems that almost every camera and DVR system ever made comes with Chinese backdoors preinstalled and they can't be blocked or removed. To me that is 100% unacceptable and is a NO SALE issue as far as I am concerned. Simple and cheap is better. I don't need alerts or motion detection or night vision and absolutely will not consider any camera that requires me to create an account of any kind at all or requires a connection to the outside world. Please tell me such a thing exists!! Oh yeah, and my budget for this very simple camera, $50 max. Thanks! Signed, The Crazy Lady...

Hi, I need some advice to build up a DVR system. I have put up multiple cameras around my place because of harassment and death threats from psychotic neighbor. I have three really old DVR recorders. One is a 4 channel clunker with very poor capabilities, it's an "ICatch US411ZS" (I'm not using this one) Another is an old "Eyemax HX08" (8 channel) that was given to me, it too has really poor capabilities. (in use) And a slightly better "Q-See QS558-1" (8 channel) (also in use) The problem with these are many. For one, the HX08 saves videos as EXE files. Um, NO. I'm not going to go to the police station with a DVD full of EXE files and tell them "trust me, run these EXE files on your computers, it's OK, really." I don't trust the EXE files it creates and I don't expect the police to trust them either. I doubt they would even open them at all and well they shouldn't. On all the machines the recording quality is pretty bad. I've tried to set them up for the highest quality possible but it seems that they have a maximum capability that has to be divided between however many channels you are recording and in this case, it's all 8 channels. I guess it's 240 FPS. The Q-See will record all 8 channels in D1 but the Eyemax won't, it records in CIF which is bloody awful. And the motion sensing feature is completely broken, it's never worked right and Q-See never issued a fix for it. On both machines I've added after market microphones so I can record audio because the harassment, threats and intimidation from my BAD neighbor is mostly verbal and is usually accompanied by middle finger gestures, crotch grabbing, mooning and displays of guns, all while he hurls vulgarities and threats at me. Another thing I hate about these machines is that they are slug slow and navigating them is a painful, miserable experience. The PTZ interface is dreadful and you can't program them to execute PTZ commands according to time schedules. You can have it do stuff like tilt & pan on events but I can't program the iris and focus to adjust per a time schedule such as open iris (N2) steps and adjust focus to (N2) at 9pm and at 6am revert iris and focus to (N1). That's extremely annoying. The Eyemax won't allow me to change the screen layout and won't let me move the time/date stamps to different spots where they won't cover over what the camera sees. So I end up having to disable the time date stamp. But then it won't let me remove or move it from the main display even though I remove it from the recordings. Blah blah blah... These machines are horrible and I need something much better. But after shopping around it seems that ALL the machines out there have the same 240fps limitations and the usual HORRIBLE Engrish interface and very probably can't be trusted after it was found that almost all DVR systems are infected with malware and or backdoors and or phone home to servers in China which I am NOT OK with. http://news.softpedia.com/news/remote-code-execution-flaw-found-in-firmware-of-70-different-cctv-dvr-vendors-502096.shtml I don't see that buying another Chinese DVR is going to help me at all. It'll just be more of the same problems and complaints I have now. So what I would like to do is build my own system from scratch. It can not be microsoft based. I do not and will not use windows. I don't own a copy of windows and I never will. I only use OS X, BSD and Linux. I have three Macs, one is an actual iMac and two are hackintoshes I built from scratch. I have another machine with an older motherboard in it running PC-BSD w/ZFS (32tb) as a NAS for my Macs. I doubt that there is really any way I can use the hackintosh macs as DVR's since real Macs don't really allow you to put random 3rd party PC cards in them so I would expect there's not even any DVR security apps for OS X. I have heard that there is software for Linux to run a DVR system so I'm thinking it might be available on BSD? But, I don't know if the old motherboard I'm using in the BSD machine is powerful enough to handle 20-30+ incoming videos. I want to have the capability to record up to 32 video channels, possibly more. I have quite a few outdoor cameras and I would like to put cameras indoors as well. I don't have indoors cameras now because I don't trust the Chinese DVR's I'm using now plus they are already maxed out, I can't add any more cameras to the two 8 channel DVRs. As of now I'm using old analog type (eyemax) dome cameras and a few OLD AD/Computar camera/lens with rs485 decoders to let me Z/I/F them. The AD cameras don't work worth a flip at night. I removed the IR filters and put up IR lights but that still doesn't help much and in the daytime everything has a horrible reddish hue. And one of the lenses broke and won't focus anymore. You can't buy parts to fix it so I would have to spend $100 to buy another OLD lens with the same drawbacks. Another problem with the analog cameras is the very poor quality Chinese video cables typical Amazon junk, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZDXC9Z8/r The wires are extremely inferior and substandard. On a 100 foot run the voltage drops so much due to the very thin wires that it's down to just a little over 8 volts which is not enough to run a camera and it's IR lights. The resolution of the cameras is VHS quality. It's awful. People, look like pixels moving around on a 1991 Nintendo games. You can see them, you can tell they are people and ~ I ~ know who they are usually but they aren't readily identifiable enough to use in court for prosecution purposes. But for now I have to stick with the analog cameras because I have a lot of them and I can't afford to replace them all at once. I'll have to do it a few at a time over a year or two as my budget allows. I want to end up replacing them with HD megapixel cameras so I suppose that will mean I'll need POE/IP cameras and I need them to have audio. Excellent HD night vision is a must. I need to see at might like it's daytime. (BW night vision is fine). Also I need them to be hard wired, I won't even consider WIFI at all. My house is about to be clad in new aluminum siding with foil backed foam board which will kill my WIFI (which is already awful as it is). I don't know anything about POE/IP cameras and it's wiring but I'm assuming CAT6 or CAT7 wiring? I'll dedicate a switch just to the cameras so that they won't interfere with my LAN. I can feed them into a 48 port gigabit switch and connect that directly the DVR machine which I plan to put four gigabit ports into. I put four gigabit ports in all my machines anyway. But I will want the cameras to operate on a physically separate LAN from everything else. Does the Linux (or BSD) software allow a mixture of analog and IP cameras? And as for the analog cameras that I have to continue to use until I can eventually replace them, I need to find some sort of capture cards. I've looked at all the assorted capture cards and they all seem to have the 240fps limitation of the ready built DVRs. An 8 or 16 port card will still have to divide it's 240fps between however many cameras are connected to it. So I'm thinking that I would be better off just using a bunch of 4 channel cards instead? Would that be a feasible option? OR, my math tells me that I could get 30fps on 8 channels but would I be able to record 8 channels of D1 at 30fps? I don't even want to waste my time on it if it will be CIF. If I could get 4 or 5, 8 channel cards to record 30fps D1 that would be acceptable, but is it feasible? And of course I have to have the ability to record audio as well, from multiple sources. I've put up several microphones but they pick up too much background noise to be very helpful unless the guy is yelling at me. He's somehow figured out at what level he can talk where his voice becomes muddied from auto traffic noise, lawn mowers, birds chirping, etc.. He'll often times make his verbal assaults on me with his voice low enough that I can hear him but the microphones have trouble. So I need to somehow make the microphones work like shotgun mics do. I have a shotgun mic for my DSLR but there's no way I can put it outside, it's not even remotely weather resistant in any manner. So, homemade shotgun mics? Or does anyone make such a thing already for surveillance systems? I'm kind of hoping that when I switch to IP cameras that with them each having a microphone that they can somehow work together to do noise canceling. Isn't that why an iPhone has several microphones, so it can do noise canceling ? Even if it can't do it in real time maybe it could be done in Adobe Premiere or some third party app? On my Mac, in iMovie there is an option to enhance voice and it does a decent job of it but it's pretty lame for processing DVR recordings, that's not what it was really designed to do. Surely there must be a way to build a good HD, non-windows DVR system that's better than the crummy, un-trustable, Chinese junk that Amazon & Ebay is flooded with. It would be nice to be able to record HD video and keep it indefinitely plus have the ability to easily dump clips to DVD in high quality x264 or x265 mkv files that I can hand over to the police when need be. The CIF quality avi and exe (WTF?!) files that I have a miserable time extracting by thumb drives are really not acceptable. It's slow and cumbersome and just really poor quality. I don't have an endless supply of cash I can dump into a whole new system so I have to do it a little bit here and a little bit there over a long time, the ability to deal with analog and IP cameras at the same time would be extremely helpful. In my house I have several monitors setup so I can watch the cameras including one at the foot of my bed that I leave on while I sleep so I can wake up and everything going on around my house then go back to sleep without having to get up. But I can only view 8 cameras this way so it's not very practical. I would like to be able to see all of them at once and it would be nice if it could do PIP for spot when there are events such as motion detection. 32" HDTVs are cheap now and I've already got a few 50 foot HDMI cables to carry DVR output from the Q-See DVR to my desk and to my bedroom. I need to add a third monitor in my kitchen where I spend a LOT of time, that's fairly trivial to do. I guess that the machine I build just needs to have HDMI output as well as DVI, there should be plenty of video cards like that on Amazon or Newegg still, as far as I know they haven't totally phased out DVI and HDMI on pc cards just yet. A $100 or so should get me a really decent Nvidia card that will run in Linux or BSD. I don't really know where to start because the Amazon reviews are, well, I just don't really think they are accurate or truthful in many cases. And Amazon tends to blend reviews from many similar items together so you don't know if you're really reading a review about the exact items you are considering for purchase. If this can't be done in PC-BSD I would have no problem building a dedicated Linux machine for the DVR. I haven't used Linux much in a few years but I think they have a fairly decent integration of ZFS for it now if you're willing to overlook the licensing issues (which I am). I'm not a huge fan of Ubuntu after some of the shenanigans they pulled (which is a big part of why I switched to BSD). When my photography hobby became more and more of a profession I ended up switching to OS X and when I outgrew my iMac I had to build much bigger, much faster hackontoshes. I would love to have an OS X native DVR system but I just don't believe there is such a thing since a hackintosh isn't officially supported by anyone and factory made Apple Macs don't play well with hardware built for the PC world. So, DVR software for PC-BSD ~ OR ~ if not then for Linux. If it can handle analog AND IP cameras at the same time that would be very awesome. HD cameras with audio that have very good night vision and are megapixel and POE/IP but NOT WIFI. No WIFI. Hardwired only. Analog capture cards that will work in a PC-BSD / Linux machine to give me the very best recordings possible for the analog cameras. A bunch of 4 channel cards? Or 8 channel? I found some OLD capture cards in a box of junk but they are really old and I don't if they even work or not and the motherboard I have might not even have slots these will fit into. So I'm guessing I should plan on buying new PCIe cards anyway, yes? I'm really unsure about spending hundred of dollars on video cards that *may not even work* on non-windows systems. And I'm having trouble sorting through the specs on most of them, the Engrish is always lacking in accuracy and detail and often times seems to be circular and misleading if not flat out dishonest. I see lots of capture cards on Ebay but they ALL say they are for windows. None of them say if they will work under *nix systems. I know their software won't and I don't care about their software at all, it would go straight to the circular file anyway. As long as the *nix apps can use the hardware, that's all I care about. I think Zoneminder is the software for *nix but maybe there is something else? Something newer or better? I don't know. I need a surveillance system for 2017, not this clunky junk that's all based on 1990's technology and cameras based on 1950's technology. But until I get everything completely updated I'll have to suffer through a mix of old and new tech. I know what I want this to end up doing but I'm not really sure how to get there. I can put all the stuff together and make it work but my concern is getting the right stuff to begin with. I can't afford to spend money on stuff just to find out it won't work or it is woefully inadequate. Many times in the past I have been tricked into buying substandard stuff because of false / misleading / misrepresented specifications. If you guys could point me towards the right stuff I would really appreciate it a lot. I really need a much better surveillance system because things are getting out of hand with this psycho neighbor. I need to be able to not only monitor my premises inside and out 24/7 but I need to be able to pull high quality recordings from it quickly when it's time to call the police. Thanks much!

Oh yeah, as for signs, I put up several so that everyone knows that there are cameras and that I am recording audio. Besides, bad neighbor knows it and the cops know it. They had stood on my porch and I told them about the cameras and audio recording and they told me "People that are doing things they shouldn't be doing are the ones that complain the loudest about cameras." Oh and I also put purple paint on all my gate posts and door frames. In Texas we have the "Purple paint law". I've also studied up on our "Castle Doctrine" laws.

Wow! Good stuff! Thank you! Linux will be the route for me since I don't do windows at all. I see Ubuntu has ZFS integrated into it now. Not a huge Ubuntu fan but if it works, well... As for making it available outside of my home, I really would rather not do that at all in the first place. I simply do not trust the world. Waaaaay too many bad actors out there. I've read some pretty frightening things people can do if they want to. And not much you can do to stop them. Even disconnected systems are at risk if someone wants in. The varios HD type cameras you mentioned are unfamiliar to me so I have some homework to do. I've been using old analog stuff for about 7-8 years now. After the economy went to pot during the previous administration I scooped up oodles of old analog cameras and gear for pennies on the dollar. But It's time to move on now and get with the new century. As for audio recording I'm doing it already and I don't care what the consequences are. All the neighbors know I do it and the police know I do it. The psychotic barbarian living straight across the street from me makes death threats against me, frequently harasses me (daily), curses and calls me many vulgar things, sits on his porch with a gun, drinking beer and shooting the finger at me and yells "F**KING BULL D*KE WH*** B***H!" and "F*** YOU B***H!" constantly. He tries to taunt me into coming outside by yelling "COME OUTSIDE B***H !!", rips his shirt off and stomps around at the edge of my yard, daring me to come outside of my own house. He and his wife and his kids shine Q-beam lights into my windows and cameras at night and try to damage my cameras with lasers. The Q-beams are them trying to disrupt me from sleeping and to try to damage the cameras. He stood in the street and was talking loudly on speakerphone with a friend and told him "That b***h had me thrown in jail, she don't know who she's f***ing with, I'll straight up get a sniper rifle". And the other night him and his wife stood in the front facing my house, he handed her his beer then dropped his pants to the ground and stood there naked from the waist down for at least 30 seconds, then he pulled his pants part way up and stood there some more and yelled "F***ING BULL D*KE C*** WH*** !".. I had to have a gate opener installed so I can come and go without having to get out of my car to open/close/lock the gate by hand like I had been doing because I was vulnerable then. Now I can open the gate by remote, back out, close the gate and drive off without getting out of the car and the same when I come back. I had to put some faux ivy privacy panels over my gate because he would stand at the street and look through my gate and curse at me and make threats. Once I put the privacy stuff up and they couldn't see into my yard anymore him and his wife were FURIOUS and were cursing and telling their visiting friends that I put up "ghetto camouflage to hide behind". After that they would back a pickup truck right to the edge of the street and stand on the tailgate to try and see over my gate into my yard. Just about 20 minutes ago he blasted my cameras with his Q-beam then stood on his porch with his arms raised and yelled "Come on. Do something about it b***h"... I've got several DVD's full of all the harassment and threats he's made towards me and after getting almost no help from the police I'm going to go see the District Attorney next week and let them see all this stuff. I'm thinking the part where he exposed himself, that should get him a felony sex offender conviction. Plus I have two different recordings of him beating his wife and threatening her with a gun. That should get him some prison time. Thing is, when the police finally goes after him for all this stuff he's going to go full tilt insane and I'm really going to be at extreme high risk. He'll kill me if he gets the chance, I have no doubt of it at all. I hope the police will take his guns from him when they arrest him for all this. Even if they do I'm sure he'll get another one or he'll find some other weapon to attack me with. In a million years I never would have thought something like this could ever happen to me, I have never had a problem with a neighbor in all my life until this white trash barbarian RENTED the house across from me. ALL the neighbors are terrified of him and now no one walks their dogs down the street anymore. This used to be a very nice neighborhood and everyone always was very safe here. Now everyone is terrified to leave their homes. Every time this scumbag threatens me I put up another camera or two. And when he sees my cameras it infuriates him and he flies off into a rage. More rage? More cameras. Anyway, so my goal is to begin replacing the old cameras and gear with new, high tech, high def cameras. I want my house and yard to be completely covered so that there is no way anyone can approach my house day or night without being recorded and me being alerted. One limitation I have to work with is that because of the style of my house, there are no eaves that I can put cameras under. My house is a French Provincial with a Mansard roof so in other words, it's a big square box. There's almost no way to mount cameras in a way that they would be discreet. I can't have a bunch of cameras bristling off of the house like a prison or Fort Knox because it would look awkward, odd and tacky. I have to get new siding on the second story soon so I think what I will do is have them install planter boxes under the windows then I can mount dome cameras (of the same color) under the planters so they won't be so obvious. I can see myself ending up with anywhere from 24-30 cameras outdoors and at least 8 cameras indoors for the downstairs. No need for cameras upstairs because it's unlikely he or anyone else would try to come through the windows up there. But downstairs, that could be a problem. I need to replace my doors with ones that can't be broken down and put cameras where I can see in all the rooms with windows downstairs. I've got three dogs (two German Shepherds and a barky brown dog) and I sleep with a display on at the foot of my bed and two handguns on the night stand. If he tries to break in my dogs will wake me and everything will be over once and for all shortly thereafter. I'm really tired of this guy and I'm trying to get the videos all sorted out so I can show the DA what this guy has been doing. But even if they arrest him (again) and put him away for any length of time I KNOW he'll come after me. I can not and will not just sit blindly inside my house, unaware of the outside world, hoping that he doesn't come after me. I'm preparing for the inevitable. I'm not going to be a victim, I'm going to be the victor. You ever see one of those movies where some woman is terrorized and victimized by some low life then she has enough of the BS and she goes into kick a** mode? Yeah, that's where I am at now. I've had enough and I'm switching gears into kick a** mode. Thanks again and I'll probably get back with more questions about cameras and stuff as I try to educate myself about the new tech...

Hi ! Guys, I have a HUGE problem. About 15 months ago I moved from my old place to the home my folks built 45 years ago (Mom passed away, Dad remarried and moved away, left this house to me). This is a very nice upper-middle class neighborhood that's ALWAYS been crime free, there has never, ever been problems here. Until recently. The house across the street from me was bought up some years ago by a slimy doctor that invests in rental property all over. Lots and lots of rental property. Much to my dismay I learned this after I had moved into my parent's home (now my home). The owner of the home lets a rental management company handle it 100% so all they have to do is collect a check for owning it. So about 6 months ago the people in there (a bit shady but not too horrible) moved out. Just a week later a new family moved in. No problems for a few months until xmas eve. I had ONE camera at the time looking out through a window. It was a pretty awful setup but I didn't want to put up my old cameras that were in traditional Pelco weather cases such as you see outdoors at gas stations. They are large and would look very odd on this very nice house. At my old house I hide them under the eaves of the house but this house has no eaves. So I had just the one camera looking through a window. I was sitting at my desk and I saw people out front riding a go cart in the street. No problem. But then I saw the guy ride it through my yard. Problem. So I go outside and there are two grown men in the street, one standing, one in the cart. I ask him to turn the engine off so I can talk, he does and I ask him to please do not ride his cart in my yard anymore. He instantly flew into a rage and started cursing at me and denying it. I told him "I saw you on camera, I have a recording of you riding in my yard." This made him even more angry and he said even worse curse words and was yelling at me now. So I went back in the house. Next thing I know I hear him outside yelling at the top of his lungs "You F-ing B*****!" and "F YOU B****" and every bad thing you can imagine. I walked outside in my driveway to the inside of my gate and he was running around screaming and cursing, I thought he was going to run at me, jump the fence and attack me so I held my phone up in the air and told him I was going to call the police on him. He taunted me and dared me to. I got too scared to even call 911, I thought he might kill me if I did. After 10 minutes of verbal abuse I went inside and called my dad and told him what happened. I was shaking and throwing up. By the way, this guy, he's a big gorilla looking dude, like he takes steroids and has road rage. That's what I call him, Mr. Roid Rage. My dad told him to stay inside and don't do anything unless he tries to break in the house. So I left it at that. I thought that was the end of it, I didn't hear anything from him for about 6 weeks. About a month ago my dad has a friend that owns a small store and the guy upgraded his cameras to all new HD stuff so he took out all the old gear, handed it to my dad and told my dad to give the stuff to me. Woot woot! So I was gifted eight iMax cameras and an 8 channel DVR. I already have an 8 channel DVR from my old house so now I have two. The one I already had is way better anyway. So about three weeks ago I put two of the iMax cameras on the front of my house. One was working, one was not connected yet. Both were pointed down at my yard so I can see when someone pulls into the driveway or when UPS pulls up to deliver. It also could see about half way into the street. So a few days pass then I'm sitting here and I hear cursing and I look up and see Mr. Roid Rage standing right on the edge of my yard, on the curb but not in my grass. And he was just standing there, pointing, staring at my cameras and cursing loudly. He kept walking back and forth cursing and pointing, this went on for an HOUR. And it got more and more intense. He was yelling for me to come outside because he wanted to talk to me, so he said. And I did not. I stayed inside and did not say a word or show my face at all. Then he took his shirt off like guys do when they want to fight and his anger was so intense that I was in fear for my life even behind locked doors. So I called 911 and I told them I was in fear for my life. The police pulled up in a few minutes and turns out the guy had an open beer in his hand. They handcuffed him and arrested him within seconds of arriving and he was charged with public intoxication. After they took him to jail his wife came outside and she started cursing at the police, I had the door cracked so I could listen and I hear her say "It's her fault! She started the whole thing when she put cameras up to spy on us!" The cop told her "She can put up as many cameras as she wants and she can aim them right at your front door if she wants, it's totally legal and within her right because you have no expectation of privacy in the front of your house. If the mailman or UPS man can see something without peeking over a fence then she can point a camera at it and record it." So Mrs. Roid Rage went back inside and the cops came to talk to me about it and I told them what all had happened. He told me the same thing about my cameras, that if it's out front they have no expectation of privacy and I can aim as many cameras as I want at their house. While we were talking he pointed to a box on his chest and said "See this? This is a body camera, it's recording you and everything you say, you're in public and have no expectation of privacy. " I replied "That's fine, that doesn't bother me at all." After a little chat about the whole mess the cops went on about their business and I went back inside. Mr. Roid Rage was able to bond out of jail about 6 hours later that evening. Since then I have been totally afraid to go outside. I'm afraid to take the trash to the curb, I'm afraid to mow my yard or do yard work, I wasn't able to go outside and enjoy my azaleas when they bloomed, I can't do my gardening and most of all, I can't ride my bike anymore because I'm scared to death of this guy. So after that happened I went on Amazon and I bought a microphone kit for my cameras and now it can and does record audio of everything going on in front of my house because of all the threats and intimidation. I need to have video and audio proof of the harassment and terrorism he is inflicting upon me. I talked to some of the other ladies around here and they too are afraid to go outside anymore because of him and two of them now keep shotguns at hand and their curtains drawn all the time. We've become prisoners in our own homes because of him. My dad gave me two pistols because of this and I now wear two freaking pistols on my belt all the time. I also have three large dogs that will eat him alive if he comes in here. Since then I have also added the rest of the cameras and have eight cameras watching my house and yard in addition to recording audio out front 24/7. But now I am wondering about the audio recording because this past Sunday he was standing out IN THE STREET talking on a cell phone very loudly and part of the time he put the other party on speakerphone! This was a quiet Sunday morning and he could have made his phone call inside his house but instead he came out into the street, where he KNOWS I have cameras. So as he paced back and forth, in the street, talking loudly I heard him telling the other person he is worried that his life is going to be ruined forever because he is going to have to put a sex offender sign in his yard. He was asking the other person advice on how to convince a jury that he didn't do it. Then there was a lot of talk about a teenage girl. So apparently he has recently been arrested for sex crimes against an underage girl and he's in a panic about his future. Then he said "I'm gonna make that little b**** get on her knees and I'm gonna put a f***** gun to her head". I could only get about 80% of what he was saying because he was pacing around and sometime he would turn away from my house while talking. So he was either telling the other person on the phone that he intends to murder his accuser or he plans to terrorize her into changing her testimony against him. Then he walked over to a truck parked in the street in front, flipped down the tailgate and sat on it and continued to talk. "You should see all the f***** cameras this b***** has over here! Yeah man, that b**** has three cameras on the front, one on each side and three on her garage. I want to know what the f*** that b**** is protecting in there. Yeah, I'll bet she's got a meth house in there." (Sure. Right.. I'm a 55 year old woman with social anxiety disorder that never leaves the house, ever. No visitor, ever.. It's like a ghost house, no one would ever know anyone lives here except that it's kept up.) So he goes on, "Yeah man, a few weeks ago I was f***** with that f***** BULL DYKE (and as he says this he turns and looks right at my house and says this extra loud) and the cops show up and arrest me for P.I. (public intoxication) and I went to jail for awhile. Then he mumbled something else I couldn't make out then he says very loudly "Yeah, well that f***** b**** put me in jail. She don't know who she's f****** with. I'll straight up get a f****** sniper rifle!"... As he said that he jumped off the tailgate and began to walk back into his house and as he got to the porch he ended his call and went inside. So the entire 28 minute call was conducted while he was standing in the street in front of my house and he did it in a loud voice as if he wanted everyone to hear him. On an early Sunday morning. Later the same day he had guests over and he walked them around in the street, walking up to the edge of my yard, pointing out my cameras to them, more cursing and then they retired to the front porch where they discussed different ideas to blind my cameras. I heard him say "I'll get a 1,000 watt light from my brother in law and I'll aim it right at that b****'s house, I'll blind her and her f****** cameras then she can't see anything I'm doing. I'll make it so bright she'll have to put tin foil on all her windows, she'll never sleep again." A few other ideas were thrown up such as paintballs and BB guns to put out my cameras but they pretty much agreed that the extreme lights were the safe way to go. As for that, I would imagine that shining an extreme light on my house to annoy me and blind my cameras would be illegal. My cameras are passive, his light would be an actor aggression and harassment and an invasion into my space. And by blinding my cameras he could sneak into my yard to murder when when I'm unable to see and record him. Then there was the discussion of either murdering or intimidating a witness against him in a rape case that he is the perpetrator of. And there is the discussion of him getting a sniper rifle in response to me having called 911 on him a few weeks ago and him going to jail for it. Being that he had that conversation in the street in front of my house and he did it loudly as if he wanted me to hear it, am I OK to contact the police and give them a copy of this video and audio recording in which he discusses criminal activities that concern a rape and maybe even two murders that he is considering committing? Can I get in trouble for this recording? I did not put the cameras and microphone up to record him specifically but to protect me from him and people like him. I believe that it's his own stupidity that he was running his mouth in the street, just like when he was drinking on a public street and terrorizing me. By the way, he was never charged with terrorizing me that day, only with public intoxication. But now this is more than just some beer swilling moron talking smack in the street, he openly discussed rape, murder and tampering with witnesses, ON A PUBLIC STREET! Should I call the police and tell them all of this? Or should I just keep quite about it and hope he doesn't actually try to murder me? My dad gave me two pistols (I do know how to use them) and he told me "If he physically attacks you you shoot him in the chest and once you pull that trigger don't you stop pulling the trigger until the gun is empty or he's down and dead. And if he's still alive you take out the other pistol and empty that one into his chest too." I don't want to kill anyone, I just want this white trash evicted from my neighborhood. I don't know what to do with this video/audio because I can't understand the 20 dozen different things I've read online about survelliance camera audio recording. It varies from state to state and it's all in legalease that I just do not understand. Thank you for any legitimate advice you can give me, I'm truly in fear for my life, this guy has been terrorizing me and the other neighbors and this recording may be the one and only chance we have to get him out of here forever. I just don't know how (or if) to proceed. Thanks!

Since I last posted my psychopathic neighbor has ramped up his harassment to the level of terroristic death threats which I have recorded. The narcotics police raided his house, unfortunately they didn't find anything and didn't arrest him. Naturally he blamed this raid on me. After the cops left and as soon as they had turned the corner he came back out on his porch and went into a rage of cursing and theatrics that include him standing on his porch, clasping his hands as if he is holding a handgun then aiming (his pretend gun) at my house, acting as if he is shooting while saying "BLAM BLAM BLAM". The intent of that action being to intimidate and terrorize me, to send me the message "I'm going to shoot you b*tch". Here is a short clip of him doing that, with audio so be warned this video clip is NSFW !! https://youtu.be/Vs-7bNsuGZo He did that right after the police left, literally, just less than one minute after they were out of view. When I saw him doing this I panicked and I called 911 on him. The regular beat police then came in two cars. Some cops went over to talk to him and his wife (who also is an active participant in the harassment) and a few cops came over to talk to me to take my complaint. I told the police I am tired of him terrorizing me and that I want to press charges against him. So they had me fill out a report to file and he told me he would turn it over to detectives. THEY DID NOT ARREST HIM. They told me to get my videos compiled onto DVD and take them to the detectives. (I am working on that now). And after the police left for the second time he sat outside in front drinking beer cursing loudly and shining a Q-beam into my windows until 3am. A few days later a detective called me to get more details. He told me that they won't charge him with terroristic threats but instead a trivial misdemeanor charge of something like public cursing. Now at this point none of the police have seen the videos of what this guy has been doing to me. All they know is that when they get here they find a distraught woman that's having panic attack and having trouble making sense. So they just roll their eyes at me like "B**** please....." and seem to be annoyed that I've taken then away from coffee and donuts. Another thing this guy is doing it using a Q-beam light that he shines into my windows and cameras on a nightly basis. Here is a video of him using his light to harass me. https://youtu.be/ulgL6EsM4XY This stuff goes on DAILY and NIGHTLY. Around the clock this guy harasses me and does every thing he can think of to scare me. The day he did his "BLAM BLAM BLAM" thing on the porch then harassed me all night, my Fitbit showed that my heart rate ran at more than TRIPLE it normal rate of 52bpm. For almost 8 hours that night my heart rate went from it's usual 52bpm to 168bpm for EIGHT HOURS! I lost 5 pounds that night just from the sustained heart racing. That's extremely dangerous as I have bradycardia (abnormally slow heart rate). My dad told me this guy is going to kill me just by making me have a heart attack. So now that I've compiled the videos onto DVD I'm taking them to the police and I don't care if I'm not allowed to record audio, I did and I did it because this guy is terrorizing me and this is my proof of it. I want him arrested and prosecuted and I want his life ruined forever. I want him to get his fair serving of karma. NOW. I am preparing for the coming storm. This guy IS going to retaliate against me. I found his name, where he used to live, all his social media accounts, photos of him passed out drunk on the floor, where he works, what he does, his phone number, his work number, names of all his family members, etc... On his faceborg account I found that he has "liked" numerous faceborg pages for firearms and ammunition makers so I am ASSUMING that he owns one or more handguns and maybe long guns. That's fine because I now openly wear two pistols at all times and I'm using SERPA CQC holsters and some very nasty hollow point hydra shock ammo. I've told the police that if he attacks me I will kill him. The local district attorney was on TV yesterday telling the whole world that NOTHING WILL HAPPEN to anyone that kills an intruder into their home. I have no intentions of wounding an attacker, I will shoot to kill. https://youtu.be/MelCmm4NRtE And under the Texas "Castle Doctrine" that extends into my yard as well. Anyway, so now I'm needing to upgrade my camera system. I'm using old analog cameras. Several years ago I bought a bunch of used cameras cheap and they served me well for the money I spent on them. Then earlier this year my dad's friend gave him 6 old eyemax cameras and an 8 channel eyemax DVR to match it. I have an OLD 8 channel Q-See DVR. The Eyemax DVR only records in CIF but the Q-See records in D1. I use the Q-See as my primary DVR but I've got more than eight cameras so I've moved lower priority cameras over to the Eyemax and I have to run two screen to watch them. I also DO NOT TRUST these DVRs because they are, like all of them are, from China. I want to put cameras in my house but there is no way in the world I will do that using off the shelf Chinese made DVRs. Not gonna happen. I want to replace my analog cameras with HD cameras and I want some method of recording and managing them without using a Chinese made DVR. It seems that most DVRs have problems recording above D1 at normal frame rates. From what I understand the BT chips only handle about 4 video streams per chip so you have to have one BT chip per four cameras but then you need a powerful CPU to process all that. Blah blah blah.. Ok, so analog has major bottleneck problems. IP cameras are where it's at, I believe. I want HD cameras. And I need some way to overcome or work around the problem of bug swarms, fog and idiots with Q-beams and lasers. I don't like the Eyemax cameras having the IR lights inside of them, bugs and fog render them almost useless. So I need something else but I need to see at night. I have to see at night because this guy is going to come back to retaliate against me in the future. He will, I know he will. The other problem I have with the current cameras is the motion detection in them is GARBAGE. Absolutely and utterly worthless. Bugs set it off. Fog sets it off. Dancing pixels in the dark sets it off. The rings of Saturn sets it off. It's such complete and absolute garbage that I can not use it at all, period. Even set to the lowest possible sensitivity it still goes off. And that's on both the Eyemax and the Q-See. So what I would like to do is build my own system to monitor and record my cameras. I need to be able to add as many cameras as I want. I plan to have 16 cameras right off the bat and will probably double that over the next year with cameras inside. I have a server that basically sits and does nothing, it's a PC-BSD server running as a NAS server by my desk. Is there video DVR software for PC-BSD? I can't covert that machine to Linux because it's running ZFS and it backs up my three Macs and acts as additional storage for them. So it has to stay as is. I don't want to spend more money to build another machine if I can avoid it. The only operating systems I use are OS X, BSD and Linux. I will not use microsoft, not under any circumstances, period. So what would be good affordable HD IP cameras to use? And can I run DVR software on my PC-BSD machine? Thanks.

Ok, I am not a legal-beagel as they say, so this is a bit hard for me to comprehend as I am unsure how it would apply to my situation. Being that I wasn't actually a party to the conversation BUT, it was essentially a public performance, considering that he chose to conduct his phone call while pacing back and forth in the street in front of my house AND he was full and very aware that he was being recorded by multiple security cameras AND he chose to conduct his phone conversation in a very loud voice, loud enough that I could hear him from inside my house. That the camera was able to record his conversation was no miracle considering how loud he was about it. When he was arrested a few weekends before he was told by the police that he has no expectation of privacy when he is outside in his front yard and that my cameras were absolutely legal and that he had no possible complaint. My cameras record audio for the purpose of protecting me from him, so that I will have a legal leg to stand on when he harasses me and or assaults me. And of course they are there to prove just cause in the event he attacks me and I have to shoot and kill him. There are there to CMA. In the course of passively protecting me they happened to record his very public performance in the public street. Now in the course of reviewing the video I discover that he has made death threats against a teenage girl that he's in big trouble over, possibly he raped her. He has intentions of either murdering her or witness intimidation to scare her into changing her testimony against him. He also made a death threat against me and I have done nothing to him. I WANT to turn this over to the police because this person is dangerous and he's terrorizing me and the rest of the neighbors. My friends and family are afraid to come visit me and they are who I have been depending on for transportation. My friends and family drive me to the store to but food, pay bills, etc.. If they are afraid to come over anymore I'll run out of food and my utilities will be shut off. He has no right to terrorize me or anyone else and he certainly has no right to make death threats against anyone. That's illegal and that alone can get him some prison time. I want to give this to the police but I'm afraid to because I am unsure if I legally can or not. I don't know what to do.

I'm just learning this stuff so I'm not really too sure what it is I'm missing here. I bought a PTZ decoder and it came in today. I couldn't find a mate to the weird connector on the PTZ head so I cut it off and I soldered the wires from the controller to the PTZ head. There is a button on the board and when I press it the LED blinks then the PTZ and lens goes through a little routine where it shows it's stuff. It will pan both directions, tilt up and down then the lens will zoom, focus and open/close the iris. So I am certain that I have the controller board connected to the PTZ head and lens properly. I had to make due with things though because the connector for the PTZ on the back on the matrix was missing. So I took a connector from one of the alarm inputs and filed off two places on it so it went from a 10 place to 8 place connector to fit in the PTZ spot. I ran wires from it to the decoder board. I'm sure I have them correct. If I can wire the PZT motors and lens all up properly the first time around then I know I can get three color coded data wires in properly too. But after that, I'm not sure what the heck to do. I go into the setup and there are a boatload of questions to answer and I'm just not sure what to set things to. I told the matrix that I'm using Pelco-D and I set the decoder board to that. I also set the baud rate on the board to 2400, per the decoder board manual. Baud rate isn't mentioned in the matrix setup. I gave the decoder the address of 14 because that's the number of the camera I'm hoping to control soon. For now it's all on my desk inside while I figure it out. (yes, that's a BIG knife there, my dad gave it to me for protection. I use it to cut plastic off of wires. ) This is the stuff mounted in a rack. I bought that surplus in Houston for a great deal because it's an oddball size, too short for most practical uses but good enough for what I needed. The thing with the handles is a pull out box on rails with the 24v power supplies. It's a pretty ugly mess in there. But it works and I did it all by myself.. Here's the stuff just stuck together for looks while I was trying to figure out a way to mount this heavy beast to the house. This isn't where it will end up being located btw. With some help from my dad we (more like he) made a thing out of old satellite dishes to attached it to the house. When I do really put the whole thing up I'm going to paint it to match the front of the house where it will reside so it won't be quite so ugly. I may even box it in with some light wood and paint it over so that only the camera and PTZ are visible. The ugly stuff would hide in the box. Yes, it's a bit over the top. But I really have nothing better to do and it's kind of fun. Yes, I'm a geek and a nerd. I get it from my parents. I blame them. Anyway, does anyone have any idea what it is I need to do to get my control equipment talking to the decoder so it will operate that camera? Once I get ONE figured out I'm going to oder more decoders and get the other lenses fixed up. I have two other cameras I want to just do lens only control, no PTZ on them, just zoom, iris and focus but they will use the same type of controllers. The keyboard is an Ultrak KEGS5000 and the control unit is an Ultrak KSX3208L. I do have the manuals for everything (found them online) but I just don't know anything at all about this Pelco and PTZ stuff, it's totally new to me and a bit confusing. I can do wires. Programming? Not so much.. Thanks!

Hi again, I'm still having grief with this setup. I gave up on the Ultrak stuff controlling the ptz. For now. The icatch dvr SOMETIMES can almost control it but it's erratic and does as it pleases. Sometimes it just goes crazy and the motor will turn on and grind the camera into the wall or all the way down and I can't stop it but to kill the power to everything and pull the data wires then restart it all. I just can not use ptz. Could it be the decoder is cheap garbage? Or the dvr? I have a single twisted pair for the data wire over cat5, I set both units for Pelco-D, 2400, address 1. I don't know what to do, I tried three decoders (all identical) and they all behave the same, badly.. I have no other controller to test with. Should I buy a new, different decoder or a stand alone controller to test with? I need the dvr to control the ptz so I can do it over my iphone. I can now but there is a 90% chance it will freak out and the camera start grinding so I can't risk remote operation. Please help suggest a course of action ?! I'm really stuck. Thanks.

Never mind. I contacted the company and they gave me a master password that let me back in to do a factory reset. After that I could log in using the default admin/123456 again and I spent 1/2 an hour setting everything up again. This time it's much more secure. And I know the master reset password as well so it's impossible to be locked out again..

No help.. That's ok. I quit. I can't figure it out by myself so I just quit and it is all sitting here not working right. Fine.. Thanks anyways..

Hi! And thank you! Ok, I'm going to give this a try, I sometimes have trouble relating exactly what I'm trying to accomplish but here goes.. I made up a crude little diagram in a pain program to roughly illustrate my basic goal. I'm mostly there except for the PTZ control. All the non PTZ cameras are up in place but are of no real consequence since they are "dumb cameras" that only feed video to the matrix's. Everything is interconnected and video is shared between all devices so that I can route video to any place I want and mix video into any combination I want. The multiplexers will only allow for input and display of 16 cameras at once so I played tricks with the matrix units to feed the multiplexers with spot output sequences, if that makes any sense at all. In other words, I can have a screen that contains a mixture of static and dynamic video feeds from multiple sources. Gaaaaaah!! Confusing! But it works! So here's my crude and confusing diagram. (You can click it to zoom to a larger, easier to read version.) I hope that makes sense. Also, I have a page of all the PDF manuals and spec sheets for most of the devices I'm using here except for the cameras, I'm using numerous types and models of cameras and they are of no real consequence other than they are all 24vac 1/3" CS types. The three lenses are Computar brand and they are zoom/focus/iris controllable. There are six wires per lens and the negatives are tied to a common negative (by me) so essentially there are four DC control wires per lens. Here's the site with the manuals in pdf format for the relevant devices. REMOVED LINK.... The manual for the decoder board came to me on a mini-cd in microsoft word format from a Chinese company in China. I do NOT trust any thing like that so I converted it to PDF on my Linux machine so as to strip any potential bad stuff out of it however, it did alter the appearance of the document from what it's original author intended. But I'm sure you will still be more than able to read and understand it. I did this for the general safety of all. (Yes, I am overly cautious. ) And here is a photograph of the decoder board. (Click the thumbnail to see a huge image.) I've looked very closely and there is no FCC ID number on the board. I am familiar with what that is but there is no such thing on this board. No surprise there considering the country of origin. Here is the only thing printed on the board that identifies it. (Click the thumbnail to see a huge image.) This is the website where I purchased the decoders from. hxxp : // www DOT securitycamera2000 DOT com/products/Universal-Indoor-RS485-Decoder-for-CCTV-PTZ-Camera-Control.html Beware, it is a Chinese website so make sure you have ad & pop-up blockers and anti-virus active! Trust no one! You'll have to edit the link to get there.. OMG........ I just typed like 6 paragraphs and it just vanished. starting over, again... Ok, I'm so frustrated right now, I forgot all that stuff I typed and now I'm drawing a blank.. I don't even know where to try and pick that up, I lost my flow of thought and now all I see is red... Um.. I can't think now. I'm going to stop, step away and take a break for awhile. I was fully immersed in thought and had everything going really well, I typed in a LOT of stuff describing and detailing all this and where I want to go with it and just all of a sudden POOF! it was gone! I'm angry and upset by that and drawing a blank so I'm going to stop awhile. I'll try to calm down and finish this up later. Right now I'm having a red head moment..

I was unhappy with the zoom, focus and iris function. It was too fast and doesn't allow fine tuning. The voltage is a bit high so I put some resistors inline between the decoder and the lens to lower the voltage thus slowing the motors and giving me a much smoother and finer grained control over the lens functions. The P&T motors I'm leaving alone, they are AC anyway. I wish they were a little faster to be honest. Maybe I can get my dad to make new gears as it's a chain & gear drive. He has a machine shop in his garage.. Still haven't put the unit outdoors just yet, I'm still not satisfied that it's bug free enough to put into real life use. I guess that's what I get for buying the cheapest decoder I could find from China.

No no no.... Waaaaay before micro channel. I mean the very, very very first IBM PC's. 5150, 5160 and 5170. The PC, XT and AT. 8088 and 80286 systems. Like this for instance, the very first PC. I was working for them in 1982 onward when it was still a hot item. I joined Team IBM right after the introduction of the PC. Oh and back in the day, I got my feet wet with Unix, I worked at a place that had an Altos with an 80186 processor and ran AT&T Unix System V. Good thing because it stuck with me. Through the late 90's I began to experiment with Linux and in 2000 I abandoned M$ window$ and became a Linux Zealot. I've also built machines to run Open BSD, Solaris and have tried pretty much all the Linux flavors but am currently running Ubuntu. I abandoned SuSE when they became a pawn of M$ and M$ began to poison the Linux well with code contributions. I've built a few Hackntoshes too (I purchased the OS btw..).. Oh yeah, and extra geek points for me, I also put up a satellite tv system. Not Dish or Direct but free to air satellite. I get a whopping 20 something channels and half the time they aren't on the air. But hey, it's free and legal! I don't work on computers anymore except for myself, it's too stressful to have a customer breathing down my neck and the pay is not good. They would rather hire a teen age boy part time with no benefits than a middle age woman that wants full time & benefits and higher pay. I can do better working part time at Walmart than as a tech person. At least at Walmart the stress levels are much lower and I don't have to use my brain much. Thinking gives me migraines. I lost my power of concentration.. This camera stuff though, is fairly easy. It's just new to me. The big problem I'm having is that I'm using stuff that is antiquated and finding information on the stuff is not easy. I can find some manuals here and there on how to use Item A. Or Item B. But I can't find manuals that tell you how to get all the items to play nice together as one big happy family. I'm assuming that in the day, techs went to class for this stuff and picked up tips from their seniors. Being that I was never in that loop, I'm afraid that all that knowledge has fallen into the black hole. I need to take a break for a bit, I'm recovering from the worst 24 hours of my life thanks to a very bad case of food poisoning. I'm exhausted. I'll drop by later. Thanks guys...

Ok... Now I have a new problem. The decoder it trippin out. The PTZ will sometimes, at random, work correctly then without warning or cause, start going goofy. I click to pan left and it will pan AND tilt at the same time. And no matter what I click, it just pans and tilts away on it's own little private mission into LA-LA-Land. I pull the power thinking that would reset it. Nope. So I thought maybe the wire I used to connect the decoder to the PTZ might have some shorts or crossed wires. So I used my Fluke to check the wires and they are all good. Then I thought maybe errant data was being sent by the controller in the little cheap DVR so I pulled the data wires and it was then stand alone with only power going to it. As soon as I applied power it would start stuttering and jittering as if it's trying to go left and right at the same time and tilt too. So to verify the PTZ as fully correct in itself, I removed the decoder and put power to it's control wires and tested each motor for up/down & left/right. No problems, works 100% fine. Put the decoder back on and it's off to LA-LA-Land again with the stuttering and secret mission to view spots on the ceiling all on it's own. Grrrrrr!!! The funny thing is, the lens operates flawlessly. It never misbehaved, it was strictly the pan and tilt functions that were goofy. So after I verified the motors are good and all my wiring is correct, I reconnected everything and bingo, now it works. But, it's done this a few times, it will work fine then it goes nutty then work fine again later. I have no idea why but I've isolated the problem to the decoder. I thought maybe it could be stuck relays so I tapped on them but to no avail. I think it's just cheap, imported junk. So far my observation is is that it's very unreliable and I can't see anyone using one of these things in a serious setup. I think the technical term for this decoder is "Mickey Mouse".. And that's putting it nicely.. I hate to think I would have to buy a more expensive one, this one wasn't inexpensive and a search of google products and ebay and what not just brings up dozens of the same thing imported from the same place that's famous for making cheap junk. In this picture you can see the decoder hanging outside the case while I'm trying to figure out what the heck it going on with it. Everything is a grand mess the past few days while I've been working on this thing. Wires everywhere! Also, here is a video of the thing while I'm testing it. In this video the thing is working fine, no malfunctions. I didn't think to record it when it was messing up but I'm sure it will again and when it does I'll record it then. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJvs8bisTv4 I'm going to call it a night now, I'm not feeling well, I am pretty sure I got food poisoning so it's time for me to get some rest. Happy New Year all!

I'm a red head. Red head = hard head. (among other things.. ) I try... I may not be the smartest gal in town but I have a lot of hardheadedness going for me, that can be helpful sometimes.. I do have to give props to my dad, he was a radio and TV repairman when I was little, both my parents are pretty smart so I guess I got a little benefit there from them. I was always a geeky girl. I wasn't popular in school so I found other ways to occupy my time and drove my dad insane watching him do stuff and asking questions. I worked for IBM for a few years at the dawn of the IBM PC days then went into a refinery and worked on computers there. I didn't program them or anything, I would replace parts when they would break which was often. It was easy. The PC would get you a code telling you the problem and you would swap the part out. Like 1701 was a hard disk adapter failure, 201 memory (hard to figure out which chip though), 301 keyboard fail, etc.... I had them all memorized and could fix any problem in a few minutes if I had the parts. The worst was memory problems, figuring out which chip to replace. I would replace a whole bank and take them back to my bench and test them in a bench machine. Putting up with the guys in the refinery was pretty rough, they saw me as invading their space plus the pay was a bummer. Eventually I ended up working with cash registers with my ex. I didn't work on them but I did a little phone support and cleaned up a few when he was short on time. So I've been around electronics for most of my life to some degree. I blame my dad. Yes, that's it, it's his fault...

Wow! I can't figure out how you did all those quotes without doing a whole lot of copy, past and editing! Whew! Well, let's see.. I'm already lost but I'll try to reply to the replies. Power for the camera and what-not... Well, as I mentioned previously, I cut the plug off of the PTZ unit because I couldn't find a mate to it. I then connected the cut off wires directly into the PTZ decoder. As of now, I only have the common, up, down, left and right wires out of the bundle of 14 control wires connected into the decoder. The zoom, iris and focus wires are connected directly from the lens into the decoder and are not yet passing through the PTZ at all. On the side of the PTZ there is a fonky looking little connection that sort of resembles an OLD IBM keyboard but the pins aren't compatible, I tried and they are arranged in a different pattern. Had the pins aligned, I would have cut the cord off an old keyboard and used it's connector. But I don't know what sort of connector it is so I can't even search for one since I have no idea of the name of the thing to put into google. So what's supposed to happen is that four wires (out of the 14) for the lens connect to the decoder. Those go to the connector on the side of the PTZ and then a cable comes from the lens to plug into that. Without a plug to plug into that socket connector thing, well, I kinda have a bit of a problem there. I don't know what to do about that... Oh, and here's the wiring diagram for the PTZ. In the diagram you can see wires 2 & 4 for video and wires 9 & 14 for camera power (12vdc) and in one of the pictures above you can see the camera power and video cables coming out of the PTZ and draped over the top of it. The video cable is wee-dinky little and totally unshielded. And there's the problem of mating the end of it (one of the cut off 14 wires) to the end of my RG6 quad shield cable. There's just no way. And I don't like the idea of the 12vdc for the camera. ALL my cameras run on 24vac and I want to keep them all uniform and standard on 24vac. I'm going to run the power and video directly into the camera and totally bypass the decoder and the PTZ. There's no sense in making all sorts of Frankenstein connections between mismatched wires (the RG6 to the PTZ wires) or routing the power though the decoder then through the PTZ plus converting the ac to dc when the camera will run just fine on 24vac. Such as this. Just a note here, some of the first cameras I put up inside I used cheap crimp on connectors and I had so much trouble with them that I bought a compression tool and learned how to do compression connectors on Youtube. But you get the general idea. Direct connections for power and video, I'm skipping the patchwork Frankencables.. The camera above is a temporary camera looking out a window until I get it moved to outside and then it will have the old connector replaced. I will have to break out two wires for the PTZ data from the CAT-5e wires that I normally run the camera power through. I use 4 wires for power, I tried it with two wires but the voltage would drop too much over the long runs so I doubled them up and problem solved. I think in the early days of this, my first cameras were 12vdc and I think I burned them out because I only used two wires instead of four. Oh well. Those cameras are trashed now. Good riddance, they were junk to begin with. I think I have an idea in mind on how to do all this so it's weather resistant by putting the decoder into the camera case with the camera and just drop four wires out the bottom of the camera case into the PTZ strictly for controlling pan and tilt. Yes, I think that will do it! Then I can wire the lens directly into the decoder and skip the funny connector that is missing and I don't know what it is. And with the decoder in the camera case it will be very much water proof. Yay! I have a plan now! Sort of like above. But I'll clean it all up and make it pretty, waterproof and have plenty of wire so that the mechanism can move all around without binding up the wires. Oh yes. Also, I've got another KSX3208L matrix now. But I only have one KEGS5000 keyboard. So I was trying to figure out how to control both units with one keyboard. I thought maybe I could run a wire from the spare keyboard connectors one to the other and give each unit a unique address. Nope. They rebooted when I put the cable in so I assume the cable was wrong. I used and old phone cord. And besides, I can't really figure out exactly how to program addresses into them, there's no information in the manuals about using two matrix units on one keyboard but there is plenty of examples of multiple keyboards on a single matrix. So that was a no go. Plan B. I found an OLD A/B printer switch box. I opened it up and cut up some old phone cables, cut some connections inside the switch box and soldered the phone wires to the switch inside. Then I ran one wire each to the two matrix units and to the keyboard. NOW, when I want to use the top unit I switch the box to A and to B to use the bottom unit. It works GREAT! It's crude and ugly and inelegant but it very much works! I got the idea because a long time ago I had a phone switch A/B thing so you could use two different phones on one line OR use one phone on two lines. I thought that would do the trick so I went online and looked but the things are like $25 now! WOA! So I remembered I had an old printer switch and I went and dug it up and got to work no it and saved myself $25 !! However, I still haven't figured out how to use the keyboard to control the two multiplexers. The manuals say that the KEGS5000 keyboard will control the KX1630CU (I have two). It would be awesome if I could have ALL of everything, including the PTZ(s) controlled by the one keyboard without fonky switch boxes. That brings up another thing. I *think* that I might be able to get the matrix to control the PTZ because I found that the KSX3208L defaults to it's own brand of PTZ domes called KD5 and KD6. However I *think* that I can change the protocol on those ports from KD5/6 to Pelco D and set the baud rate to match the decoders I have. If not, there is another connector on the back that looks like a phone connector but is a dual purpose with RS232 on two wires and RS485 on the other two. It's number 12 on the diagram above. It too can be programmed for Pelco D/P. It would be awesome to have not only the DVR control the PTZ's but the matrix/keyboard system as well. Oh, and my lenses are NOT auto focus or auto iris. So that means that the stupid little iPhone app assumes everyone uses cheap webcam grade cameras and has no provision in it for professional grade systems. No surprise there as the app and the DVR/server is targeted for the home market. It is definitely NOT a professional piece of equipment. I bought it for the DVR capability and the server function so I can see my cameras when I'm away from home. I ~can~ control zoom, focus and iris through it via remote on my laptop, the pc app does have the ability to do that but not the iPhone. Oh well, at least I can pan and tilt from my iPhone and do some minor zoom. If I zoom too much then I have to adjust the focus and iris but if I only zoom in/out a little bit I can get by without focus/iris. When I travel I carry my laptop so there's no big problem. Often times when I travel I will stop and check my cameras from my iPhone but at those times I don't have enough time to play with the cameras anyway, I just want to see the dog is OK or that UPS left a package on my porch so I can call a neighbor to pick it up for me till I get home. If I go away over night I can use my laptop and then I can have full control over ALL the cameras and camera functions. So in the end, I guess I will just deal with it. Adjusting the cameras... Well, I guess I still need to try them out on my desk to be sure they don't have a major problem going on before I put them up in a hard to get to place. As for adjusting them, I saw a little bitty TV that you can carry up the ladder with you that connects directly to the camera so you can adjust the focus and stuff. Then you take it off, put the camera cable back on and lock it all up and there you go! I have to save up for one of those though. Won't be happening this month or next. Maybe in March. I wish I understood this stuff better. I have no idea what Pelco is or RS485 and have no concept of the inner workings of any of this stuff. I am pretty good at connecting wires up but that's about the limit of my skill levels. I don't know how to program computers or much of anything else for that matter. And the manuals I have for all this stuff is just PDF's I found online but the problem is, they all assume you are going to do ~X~ with the equipment and they show you only how to do ~X~ and there is no information in there that would give you any clues on how to do ~Z~ with it. They don't educate you in any way, they tell you "hook it up this way and use it this way. That is all you need to know. Period." My problem is, I want to do a lot more with it than what their examples show and I want to use equipment other than their approved brand. Like a different brand of camera other than Ultrak KD5/6 domes. I'm sure their domes use a proprietary way of talking to each other and that's fine, for people that have a pure Ultrak system. Well, it's 4am and I need to get some sleep. I'm tired. I'll resume later today. I almost said tomorrow. HAHAHA!! Yeah right... A little rest, some coffee and a fresh perspective and I think I can get really close to wrapping up that PTZ. I should be able to get it put out front this weekend and in full operation. The last quandary is to decide which of many cameras to use on the PTZ. Do I go for higher resolution (470) but higher lux (.7) or lower lux (.5) but lower resolution (330)? Arrrrrrrgh! Color or B&W? Then there's the dual mode that does 540 lines with .7 lux color in the day time but at night it switches to 540 lines and .5 lux black and white. I give up.. My brain hurts. Nite nite!

Wheeee!! I did it! Well, mostly. Sorta. I connected the decoder into the cheapie DVR thing and it DOES control the PTZ. I have full pan, tilt, zoom, focus and iris control. What more could I ask for? Now the big thing to do is figure out how to get it all wired up pretty and waterproof it all. Both the decoder and the PTZ head are made for indoors use. I have some ideas on how to waterproof it. I'll be experimenting with that over the next few days. Also the wiring is going to be a bit of a problem. I cut off that big AMP connector because I had no clue where to find the mate to it. So I connect the wires straight into the decoder. Or, I may lengthen them so that I can place the decoder in a waterproof box and mount that box waaaaay up under the eaves of the house so that it's impossible for it to get wet unless we got 10' underwater. I also do not like that the decoder wants to power the camera with 12vdc through it. I want the camera running on 24vac directly through the common supply so that it will line lock / sync with the rest of the system. Also, the PTZ head has a wee-dinky little cable that goes through it for the video, it's only about as big around as a pencil lead. Um, no. I do not like that. I do not want to route video through the decoder and especially not through that tiny little wire. So, what I will do is connect video directly from point A to point B with no funky detours through dinky wires or funky little Chinese made circuit boards. I will also supply the power directly to the camera in the same way. In other words, the camera will be connected into the system the same way all the other cameras are, directly through Siamese quad shield RG6 and cat 5e for power and data. I have a picture in my mind of how to put the cables in a hanging loop straight into the camera case so that it can still pan and tilt normally and not tangle up. It's won't see much panning action anyway, mostly zoom/focus and tilt. And of course I need to somehow make it blend into the house so it doesn't look so ugly and freaky. That shouldn't be too hard either. I'll have to borrow some power tools from Dad, not a problem, he's got plenty of tools and stuff. Now that I have this unit pretty much working, at least sitting on my desk, I went ahead and just purchased two more decoder boards. I found them on the dealers site cheaper than the same dealer was selling the same board for on ebay. I think I paid like $26 on ebay for one, I went to their website and bought two for $20 each with free shipping. Much better! In a few weeks I can connect up the zoom lenses on the other cameras and I'll be as happy as a clam at high tide! They won't be pan/tilt though. Not needed on them. Zoom/iris/focus is plenty enough for them. MAYBE, at some point in the future, if I can get really lucky and snipe another PTZ head really dirt cheap like I got this one, then sure, I would put those cameras on PTZ too. My big problem though is going to be figuring out how to get the KEGS500 & KSX3208L units to also control the cameras. As it is now I can control them over the web, from my neighbors house and from my iPhone but the iPhone app sucks because it only allows pan, tilt and zoom. It has no provision in it to let you control the focus or iris. Really? Really? No focus? No iris?? What were they thinking??? Duh......... So yeah, it's nice to be able to have the control that I do have but I want the big stuff, the Ultrak keyboard(s) to also work them. I also need to learn how to adjust cameras. They talk about setting the output to 1vpp. I think that is something you can do with an oscilloscope, which I have. I have an OLD Tektronix 100mhz dual trace. I've hooked video devices to it and displayed colors bars. I can see the pattern on the scope that the color bars make and I can adjust the colors and see the pattern on the scope change. So I'm thinking that I can point the cameras at a test pattern, hook them to the scope and adjust the camera so that it's doing it's thing as good as can be expected of it. Sometimes I'll connect a camera and the colors are all funky and nasty looking and I have to waste a lot of time messing with it to get it right. I usually find this out after I've put it 20 feet up in a darn tree! Not fun. So I want to start setting up and adjusting all my cameras on my desk before I put them anywhere. That should save me a lot of time and frustration. I haven't used that scope in like 10 years, I don't know if it even powers up anymore. Maybe I'll check it out over the holidays as I've nothing better to do. The big problem is it's up on a high shelf and it's HEAVY. I will have to get my neighbor to help me get it down from the shelf, it's too high and heavy for me to try by myself. I'll bet it weighs 40lbs if it weighs an ounce! I also have a Fluke digital meter. It's really old too but it still works fine. So, I managed to get a PTZ working. That's a big leap ahead for me but I'm still a long way off from actual implementation. Wiring and waterproofing remain large challenges I've yet to overcome. But, I think I can do it. I got this far.

Oh.... And today I learned something new..

Hi guys! I'm new here, obviously, and looking to learn... I'm trying to learn something new, I need a new career and with the way things are in the world now, I see that there is going to be a big demand for people that can do surveillance stuff. So, that said, I began to dabble and have found it's not only fun, it's intellectually stimulating! I've got a fairly decent setup in my home. It actually started because my former room mate (she passed away 8 months ago) and I were scared witless of a few men that were stalking us, one of them was her boyfriend who had done violence to her and threatened both of us with violence. I already had one OLD little camera but it couldn't see at night. So I got on ebay and started building a new system of cameras that would let us watch the house, inside and out, day or night from anywhere. I snipped almost everything on ebay for pennies on the dollar, I have less than $1,000 invested in everything. I've been building on the system all year and it's gotten to be pretty extensive. I can give a basic list of what I've got here. (2) Ultrak KX1630CU multiplexers (2) Ultrak KSX3208L Matrix (1) Ultrak KEGS5000 keyboard (30+) ADCA330CN cameras (4) ADCA470CAFN cameras (2) ADCSHR2412 cameras (2) BV-7115H "Digital ID View" cameras (1) Computar H10Z1218AMS 12-120mm f1.8 10X zoom lens (2) Computar T6Z5710M-CS 5.7mm-34.2mm F1.0 6X zoom lens (1) RS485 decoder board Mod# PT0057 (securitycamera2000 dot com) (12) weatherproof camera housings (3) 24VAC 4amp power supplies (4) high intensity IR lights for entrance way night time illumination (1) US411L H.264 Network 4ch DVR with 1tb HDD (LOTS) of displays all around the house. In every room of the house I have multiple displays so I can see everything, everywhere at all times. (2,000') of Siamese RG6 Quad shield / Cat 5e cable (AC power and lens control is supplied through the cat 5e) I use compression type BNC fittings that I put on myself. And half a dozen or so OLD crummy cameras (in a junk box) that I would consider to be "toy" grade and probably a bunch of other stuff I forgot to mention. As of now, I have no way to control the Computar zoom lenses. I did figure out that I can (and I did) run wires from the lenses to the inside and I can touch them to a 9vdc power thing and make them zoom in/out, iris open/close and focus in/out. But that's a MASSIVE pain and oh so unsophisticated. So, I ordered an RS-485 PTZ decoder for one camera, for starters, to see if I can make it work. If I can, I will do the other cameras as well. Also, the camera with the BIG zoom lens, the 120mm zoom, I need to be able to PTZ that one so that is the camera I'm going to try that decoder on. I also have ordered a Pelco PT280-24P Pan/Tilt gadget. It says it's for indoors but I'm mounting it under the eaves of the house and going to enclose the unit in rubber to keep stray rain out. So that camera will be the beast. It will pan, tilt, zoom and all that other fun stuff. The other cameras with the smaller zoom lenses, I have no need to pan/tilt them but I do need decoders so I can zoom/iris/focus them, they will stay in fixed positions. My problem now is, I know nothing about how to do the RS-485 stuff. I also would LOVE to have my KEGS-5000 keyboard control the two KX1630CU multiplexers in addition to controlling the KSX3208L matrix AND PTZ my cameras. There are connectors on ALL the units for RS-485 but some of them are larger or smaller and it looks like cables will have to be hand made. I also don't know how to connect them. In series? Cable then like a daisy chain? The KSX3208L has connectors on it for connection to the PTZ system but how do I do those, being that I will have at least three PTZ decoders I need to control. Oh, and I guess it would be helpful to mention that I have *some* electronics background. I used to be a technician in a refinery so over the years I learned a few things. I'm not totally stumbling around in the dark but I'm a long way from being an expert in this. This started out as a survival necessity and I sort of got carried away with it and now I realize that I can use this as an opportunity to learn a new career. I love to learn and I love to do things on my own. I know I'm in the minority here and probably the only woman on here so please be gentle on me, I know I'm invading Man Land here but I where else does one go to learn these things? I would really appreciate any advice and or guidance you guys can offer, I'm new, I'm green but I'm eager to learn.. Thanks so much!

Well, I think that there is a high probability that I don't understand how to program this piece of equipment. Very high.. I think that what I will do for the time being is to connect it to the DVR which is just a cheapy Chinese device I bought on Amazon.com that's designed for home use, it's 100% for sure not a professional grade device. I do know the difference. I really just wanted it to have a simple DVR and a way to access my cameras when I'm away from home to check on my house & dog via my iPhone. It does a decent job of that. It also has a mouse and a pop up menu for camera control. It does have PTZ capability built into it and I suspect will be much easier for me to program. It will be a good learning experience and for now, it will get me going. Plus it will let me PTZ the camera from my iPhone. Once I figure out the Ultrak stuff I can tie it in as well so that I will then have an additional way to control things via the Ultrak keyboard AND my iPhone. Oh and the DVR mouse too.. Eventually I want to add two more Ultrak keyboards, I want to place them in other rooms of the house so I can just walk over and there it is. I already have displays all over the house, might as well put keyboards too. I think for now the DVR will be the fastest, simplest way to get it going and as I figure things out I'll add in the more complicated stuff. Oh, here's the back of the matrix. The reason I put three wires was that I had read somewhere that you need the data + and data - and a ground wire. There are several ground connections on the PTZ connector on the back of the matrix. I always thought everything needs a ground.

Hehehehe! It's like sitting in a glass house but the windows are like those two way mirrors, I can see out and around everything, everywhere but no one can see in. The plus side of this is that if there is any monkey business in the neighborhood, I have recordings of it. Every couple of years there's a rash of robberies, usually they will go through and get into all the parked cars and boats looking for things to steal. About 2 years ago they hit everyone and got an arm load of fishing poles and a few handguns. I couldn't believe my neighbors kept loaded handguns in their unlocked boats and cars! So far we haven't had any vandalism that I know of but it will happen, there are a bunch of young boys around that are about to become teenagers and they are already practicing for trouble. I caught one of them shooting my satellite dishes with a BB gun while my dogs were standing right by them. I was around the corner and he didn't see me until I heard the pop and the ping of the BB and the Wicked Witch zoomed down on him. I think I made a believer out of him. So yeah, there are some demon spawn boys around here and in a few years when they get older I strongly suspect things will get wild around the hood. Hopefully they will think twice because they all know, Big Sister is watching.. Anyway, so yeah, I'm the official neighborhood "kooky old lady" because I have a bunch of satellite dishes too and one time I told a neighbor I was talking to Martians on them. It just took off from there. I'm already the oddball for being a female that messes with electronics, I'm pretty much alone there. I only know one other woman that knows her stuff and I'm telling you, she knows computers and would shame just about anyone with her knowledge and skills. But of my friends, I'm the only one, they have no clue what all this stuff is. I wish they would show some interest in it, I could soooo teach them, it's really not THAT hard to do. The way I see it, this is a skill that will be in increasing demand. My daughter lived just outside of London, England a few years ago for a few years and she said there are like 200 cameras every 5 feet there. Well, maybe not that many but a LOT. And what's really freaky is that what would be private cameras here, are all tied into Big Brother there. Even store cameras are all tied into "The System", so any camera you see in any public place is a Big Brother camera. She said it's like stalkers because you can be walking along and cameras will start following you, stop when you stop, etc.. She said it was creepy at first but people told her that's just how it is there, get used to it. She did object to the camera that was aimed directly at her bedroom window on a pole that was just 30 feet away from her house. She complained but her complaints went into a black hole. So she just kept the blinds drawn at all times. I see the US going that way, fast. It's a messed up world and there's some BAD people out there and paranoia is high. I am certain of it, the CCTV industry is growing like mad and there is no end to it, it's only going to get bigger, faster at an exponential rate. How much is too much? Where does it stop? There are no limits and it will just grow and grow into an unstoppable force and before long we will be under the never blinking eye 24/7 just like all of England is. So rather than fight it I might as well get on board with it and see if I can make a living at it. I'm pretty sure I can do it. Maybe I can take a course in this stuff. I'm willing to be you have to be certified by someone to do this sort of thing professionally. I might have high expectations but at this point in my life I need to find a career and I just have a feeling that this is a good one to pursue.

LOL! My house is a little under 1,000sq ft. including the garage. Um, yeah, I'm a little camera happy. I have 6 cameras for the front of the house and I can see my entire yard, my front porch all the way down the street (intersection to intersection) and one camera is zoomed in to one intersection so that I can see individuals sitting in their cars at the stop and sign very, very clearly identify them. I have two cameras in the garage and pretty much each room of the house, even the hallways with the exception of the bathroom which has no cameras at all and never will. Ewwwww... No need for that! I have four cameras on the two sides of the house, I put them in a "cross eyed" setup so that there are no blind spots (I do this inside and outside, front and back) and in the back yard I have oodles of cameras in trees and on the house, even a tool shed. I can see everything, everywhere at all times. Another benefit of them is that I can see where my dog (I had two dogs until recently ) is at all times and what she's doing. If I see her doing stupid things like sniffing the kitchen counter I can do my little throat clearing thing. She hears it, freaks out and comes to see what I'm doing. She gets busted and she knows it. Or eating charcoal briquettes. She has taken a fancy to them lately. Sheesh.. But it really started out because my BFF / room mate and I were scared of some men that had evil thoughts on their minds about us. I added a few cheap cameras and a four channel B&W multiplexer but it was sort of lame so I looked for better. Then I sort of started climbing the ebay ladder of addiction and I used my nifty sniper tools to win some incredible deals on some very high tech surplus stuff for insanely cheap prices. It was so cheap I was like "Why not?" Now it's sort of become an obsession, like an OCD sorta thing. I find it to be fairly simple to connect this stuff up, the worst part of it is crawling around in the attic running cables. That is NOT fun. Not even a little bit. My problem now is, I'm struggling with a whole new thing, PTZ and I'm drawing a blank.. I'll post something about my PTZ problems in the appropriate section in a bit. I also have some photos of some of my stuff I can post too. Seriously, I think I can learn this and I think it's something I could do, for a living. I hate the part about running the cables. That's best left to an agile young man with a lot more energy than I have. But the rest of it, I'm catching on and it's kinda fun. Oh, and I just added a second Ultrak KSX3208L Matrix so I now have two of those. I would like to have a third. I would like to have two more KEGS5000 keyboards and I'll patiently wait and watch ebay and pick up some more. Eventually. Oh, and more displays. Maybe I've gotten a bit carried away with this stuff but I really think in the end, I can make something of it. In the meantime, it's fun..