lbtech

I have situation where they want to monitor 6 computer stations while students are taking placment tests. The cameras will be directly overhead. The cameras need to support wireless IP. The camera only needs to monitor if the person is cheating or not (using a cell phone or cheat sheet), it does not need to see what is on the computer screen. I'm thinking a 1.2 or 2mp camera should be fine. The camera also needs to be capable of capturing audio. The software can be client based or browser based. The proctors/people monitoring the students will be in close proximity and on the local network. It will NOT be recording. This is for live monitoring only. Budget is 200 to 500 per camera. My initial thought is the Geovision GV-CAW220 or something similar. I'd appreciate any opinions on what camera would work well for this project.

Here is an odd problem that I have contacted Geovision about for the past two years - and still they haven't offered a solution. First, I'll give you the setup: 2.0GHZ pc 1GB ram 40GB HD 80GB HD DVD Burner Windows XP SP2 ATI AGP Video card Geovision 650 - 8 USB SIC device Software - 7.0 This system is a test/demo system in our office and we've had it around for a few years now. We have a few wired cameras, a DVD player and a wireless camera hooked up to it. The wireless camera is just a cheap one like you get spammed with - the size of a quarter. The receiver is a small box with an antenna on it and a channel tuning knob. It has a short length of coax and plugs into the geovision port. Everything works fine on the system, but here is the thing - If the wireless camera (12 feet away from receiver) gets a large amount of interference, or loses power, it locks up multiple camera ports on the geovision card. Example - Camera 1 - DVD input Camera 2 - Wired Dome camera Camera 3 - Wired outdoor camera Camera 4 - Wireless camera Camera 5 - Wired indoor camera Camera 6 - Wired covert camera If I unplug the power to the wireless camera, I lose all other EVEN numbered cameras. When I say "lose" I mean for the first 10 to 20 seconds the video on all even numbered cameras freezes..then turns to the blue Video Lost screen. The same thing happens if I turn the Tuning knob on the wireless receiver too far and it goes out of the camera's frequency range. I am not a big fan of wireless cameras; however there are installations where it is the only practical option. But with this freezing problem (I have re-created the problem on other systems), I hesitate to offer any kind of wireless as a solution - and thus lose some sales. Does anyone understand why this happens? How to fix it? I suspect that the geovision card does some sort of high speed cycling and when it gets to the port with the wireless receiver connected, it must get 'confused' that there is a signal of some kind but nothing it can properly display. But I really don’t understand the details of how the card operates.

Boss man asked me to see if I could find some folks willing to click on a few links with their mobile phones/pdas and give us some feedback. Please go to the following link on your phone/pda/mobile device and see if it works. http://24.158.16.194/mobile/ You should see a list of camera locations. Clicking on one will give you a jpg image. At the bottom of the list you will see a link to Controls Page. This link will allow you to activate a small 12v PC fan (which happens to be camera 01 Fan Cam). We are mainly concerned with who can or cannot access the controls page. We have developed software that records IP cameras and as an added feature, we made it possible for mobile devices to access JPG stills and activate/deactivate certain controls - such as turning on lights, opening doors, etc. So...we are looking for feedback on whether or not people can get access to our software via their mobile device. Please post your device model, service provider and whether or not you were able to access our software. Any other comments are appreciated as well. Here is a link to our main website: www.lbdata.net Here is a link to our surveillance camera demo (for PCs with broadband and activeX required) http://www.lbdata.net/Corvax/index.htm Thanks in advance! Edit - I've made a small change in the above links - we no longer use port 85...everything has been moved to port 80.

Thanks for testing and feed back! The fan is the only switch that turns anything on or off. It is associated with a camera and a 12v PC fan. When you click on the Fan button, it turns the fan on (or off) and the camera takes a picture of it. The other switches are associated with cameras, but not connected to any lights or alarms.

You can try it, however it would require a fair amount of bandwidth. Also, you would need to be able to download an activeX component to your phone.

It really depends on what the camera is transmitting at. Some cameras have options to control how many fps, what size images/frames to use, and how often to send. If you google "bandwidth monitor" you can just install the software on a pc....connect to the camera from the pc and watch the bandwidth it is actually using.

Many banks have leased lines between branch offices and home office. They should get with their data guys and increase the bandwidth to T1s. You are still going to be restricted on fps, but not as bad as 56k...

Anyone know how they are porting in the IP cameras to this DVR? http://www.ibtvideosystems.com/DVSRhybrid.htm

I am using some passive baluns for a short cable run where cat5 has already been installed. The baluns I have use a BNC conector on one end and two terminal screws on the other - labled with a + (plus sign) and - (minus sign). The diagram included with the baluns show only one pair of wires being used from the cat5 cable. My question is, for people here that have run cat5 and baluns for video (no power), do you strip and terminate the cat5 using all 4 pairs? (running 4 wires to one terminal and 4 wires to the other terminal) or just one pair? (one wire to one terminal and one wire to the other terminal) The run is only 50' or less and the cameras are powered locally.

Thought I would pass this along - I tested the baluns using a single wire to each lead like the directions show. (Brown/white to the positive and Brown to the negative) This worked great. Then I tested by running two wires to one terminal and two wires to the other terminal. (Brown/white and Brown to the positive terminal; Orange/white and Orange to the negative) This seemed to work great too. The theory was that by having more copper, you should have gotten a better signal. However I saved a still image from each of the configurations and compared them afterward. Surprisingly - the single wire connections showed a brighter picture. I ran this test a few times and double checked the connections. Every time, the signal was better on the single cable. As a side test, I captured an image using a pre-molded coax cable of the same length. The image was indistinguishable from the single wire configuration. My speculation is that the doubled up copper pairs are creating some kind of interference and a loss of quality is being seen. In hindsight, I probably should have tried mixing the wire pairs to see if that would make a difference, but I dont really have the time. (Brown/white + Orange/white to one terminal and Brown + Orange to the other terminal) Maybe another time.