CCS

The cameras are for a petrochemical plant and have approved hazardous area ratings that I cannot modify without a potentially large recertification effort. Also, if I can do it in code then I can take into account the wiper in the image analsis so unnecessary alerts are not triggered. Thirdly many of my cameras are over water and inaccessable. It would be nice to be able vary the wiping rate depending on the weather so to mininmise the need to refil the reserviors. It would be nice to do this without leaving the nice warm control room. Cam

I'm building a system for an image processed security system around a jetty. As the system is monitored by computers rather then people, I need to somehow occasionally issue a global camera wash / wipe to help the image quality in the case of sea spray etc. My image processing vendor does not normally do this, but it should not be too hard to do something myself here. I can either have a hardware system that fires a relay every so often for a short interval or I can write a program that issues the command every so often. The second option is preferrable as I'd like my vedor to eventually incorportate this feature ( and suspend analysis triggers on the wiper motion ). It needs to be something that a data transciever (preferably common and cheap) can handle, therefore possibly pelco protocol. I don't want to reinvent the wheel here. Has anyone done this before or can help in finding the command I need? I'll obviously share my piss-poor code with whatever I come up with if I need to do my own thing. Cam

Has anyone got any reliability figures for day / night cameras? My manufacturer does not have a figure for it, but my client wants to know how many 2 year spares to order (for his client). Anyone got a feeling for how many spares to buy for a 100 camera project. This would be camera only, not pan/tilt mechanisms and hopefully in a fairly temperate climate. TIA, Cam

My spec is two have three displays at each console location. I was thinking of having three ceiling mounted monitors meeting the spec and using a fourth monitor at the console for setup and control using keyboard and mouse, but not having done it, I do not know the full horrors of controlling this setup. This will be very much determined by my application vendor. The spec is still fairly vauge at the moment, but I was wondering if there was any just dont think about it issues. I may use three PCs and a keyboard /mouse switch. Anyone got anything to say about this approach?

Due to the amount of system integration on a security system, I may have to go the IP CCTV route for the first time. My spec is to have various monitoring locations around a complex with three screen consoles. Has anyone built a PC with 3 viewing screens (and potentially a fourth configuration/contorl screen). Each screen will be viewing a 4SIF PAL mpeg stream. Does anyone have some hard won experience regarding processsor / memory / chipset /videocard for this application. XP is the clients preferred operating system. TIA, Col