marzsit

How is this tricky? It's completely maintenance free... Compared to having to deal with refueling generators and making sure that they don't get stolen themselves... I'd choose solar any day... Much cheaper too, considering fuel costs. most contemporary solar panels are expensive, very large sheets of glass... glass is a fragile material easily destroyed by vandals, or accidentally destroyed by errant solid objects like one might find on a construction site, etc.. large sheet material also tends to act like a sail in high winds, requiring very solid mounting systems to keep them from being blown away. if power requirements are low and sun exposure is high, then you can get away with less square footage of solar array, maybe just a pair of 75-150 watt panels on a trailer the size of a honda accord. but, if power requirements are moderate or high and/or you're trying to put together a solar array in seattle where sunlight is rare, you'll need an array the size of a greyhound bus to make the system work. then there is the issue of making such a system portable and street legal, capable of being hauled to remote sites, etc..

Bulls**t! The "pile" is the Wintel monoply in the computer industry with the close relationship M$ has with Intel effectively locking out anyone else. The O/S is designed around the Intel processor and chipsets making it difficult for Via/AMD to compete. For anyone that supports the 'Wintel machine' you only make it worse. Wintel has no reason to change. not totally true, as windows xp was created to take advantage of additional instructions inherent to the amd athlon xp processor, it wasn't written specifically for intel silicon....

in our company we try to color-code and mark everything, it's not required by law but we try to make life easier for the technicians... usually: silver - single-phase 120/240 volt power orange - 3-phase 240/480 volt power white - security/access system red - fire alarm yellow - cctv video blue or grey, sometimes white.. - it network green - timeclocks and shift bells sometimes we are forced to compromise the color coding because we can't get the proper color when we need it.. cat 5 cable is an excellent example, the it department is always moving things around so their system is the most messed-up....

there are many off-grid power sites on the web that can give you ideas, solar is good if you're in an area that gets plenty of sun during the day and you have an efficient way of deploying the solar panels.. that can be tricky, getting enough large but still portable panels facing south.. probably a better solution would be an engine-driven dc generator/alternator charging a big bank of batteries, supplying power to inverters. your electrical demands will dictate the size of the battery bank you'll need, which in turn will dictate the size of the charging system needed to recharge the batteries in an efficient manner. such a system could be built using an automotive or truck alternator at 12vdc or better, 24vdc. much more efficient than using a commercial ac genset to run a battery charger..

i understand your pain... i'm somewhat in the same boat, i work for our company's mantenance department and we keep getting handed more responsibilities as the company is consolidating departments... most of our dvr stuff is novex2000 based, but some of it is strange.. all of it installed by outside contractors years ago, who left no documentation whatsoever so it's up to us to reverse-engineer everything. i'm pretty sure i've seen the digiflower cards marketed as avd cards with similar numbers, df-2000 marketed as the avd-2000 for example.. as far as i know there are only 3 models: 900, 1000 and 2000. what software are the systems currently running?

via chipsets have always had problems ever since they made the first athlon support chips.. for many common i/o cards there are 3rd party work-arounds out there, but cctv is such a small market compared to gaming and cad that i doubt it's possible to make every dvr card work in a via chipset motherboard. most people in-the-know tend to stick to intel hardware for dvr and security systems.

are all the cameras on one power supply? i had a problem once with low voltage on siamesed cable that caused a blurry image.. rewired and powered the camera from a wall wart 20 feet away, solved the problem. sheet metal buildings buckle something fierce in the wind.. if you can move the camera mount from the flat area to one of the "peaks" you'll have a bit more ridgidity, you'll probably need to customize the mount to do this however.

i used to pull rg62a/u all the time for computer networks, but i've also tried using it for video.. like others have said, it will degrade your signals badly, even on short runs. these days, i'm not sure what it's good for......

check if your camera can see the flashes from any ir remote control you have lying around the house. i'm thinking your no-name sony camera was made for indoor use and has no ir filter over it's ccd chip..

but are these recorded as individual jpeg files?

there are 2 obsolete devices that can do that, the "snappy" from play inc. was a video frame grabber that connects to a parallel printer port, the software could be set to do continuous capture of frames saved as individual image files. the second was the novex video catcher, a primitive dvr unit that also connected to a parallel printer port and could record at 1 frame/second with motion detection. both have been out-of-production for a long time....

i have a pair of old rca auto-iris lenses that were originally used on tube-type rca cctv cameras, the lenses are marked "made in japan" and use video drive with an 8-pin din connector for the camera. i want to change connectors so that they can be used with modern sony and panasonic ccd cameras (the intended cameras have dc or video drive capability), i have the new 4-pin connectors but i cannot find the pinout or color code for the lens cord connections... there are 3 wires, red black and yellow. can i assume that black is common ground, red is power and yellow is video signal without burning anything up?? unfortunately, i don't have a working rca tube camera... if i did, i'd probe it to find the voltages. has anyone run into this problem before, or does anyone have an old rca camera with an 8-pin din iris connector that they could check for me?

i did find out that the rca lenses were made by asahi optical (pentax) also sold under the cosmicar name. actually much higher quality than a common cctv lens available today because in order to get a good image with a grainy monochrome vidicon tube, the lenses had to be very, very good (much like the zeiss jena lenses the dslr guys are fighting over one ebay these days..) i took an educated guess and soldered the yellow to the video drive, red to power and black to ground. works like a champ with a sony ssc-c104 and a panasonic wv-cp234, much better than the cheap plastic computar lenses they both used to have.. hopefully they won't draw too much current from the camera's power supply.

i use a 4" tote vision battery-powered monitor most of the time because it's convenient to use, but it is difficult to focus with it.. you can get a good focus if you can pick out something with fine detail (like a sign in a parking lot or a poster on a wall, etc..) but most of the time that isn't really possible. i also use a 10" mintek portable dvd player sometimes, it works a lot better for focusing because of it's higher resolution but it's a pain to use on a ladder.. it really is best to pre-focus before installation where possible, using a big crt monitor..

2" stainless steel screws will work and won't harm the tree. coat the screws with an antifungal compound when you install them (drill pilot holes first) and don't install too close to a branch junction.

a couple of problems: from your photos, the camera is looking through the polycarbonate at a very steep angle.. it's doubtful that adding a non-reflective glass surface to the interior is going to help much in this situation. i would try shielding the camera and window with a dark curtain or even cardboard and tape, also, that neon "open" sign needs to go away...

so, are there no techies here, or only plug-and-play experts?