Sawbones

"anti cobweb?" Do they come with a wasp nest or something?

Yes, the US has some pretty nasty areas as well (I stay out of those). However, as an ER physician, the thugs, gangbangers, dopers, pimps, and users are all my patients. They're certainly an interesting group.

Had no idea the Bahamas were that rough, Rory... now I understand your interest in security. It's been more than ten years since I traveled there (been several times). We're not that bad here in the US... but let our economy get a little worse and crime is sure to increase, as it always does during economic downturns.

yeah everyone i know that have their own home has a generator. When you rent though we're out of luck .. just get to inhale the diesel fumes from other generators The alarm company i deal with have 2 generators, one switches auto, the other is a backup on failure of the first one. I wish diesel would have been an option for me (I'm much more familiar with diesels than NG-fired engines), but there was no way my homeowner's association was going to let me site a diesel storage tank in my back yard Edit: I like your redundancy setup. Two are one, and one is none.

2nd world boss (not quite 3rd and not quite 1st). Power was off tonight .. just about every day it goes off. Dont let there be a thunder storm .. before the lightning cracked last night, the power went off, guess they are physic Strong argument to have your own power plant I suppose... at least on a residential scale (generator + transfer switch). I invested in a NG-fired permanently-sited generator at my home that fires up automatically when the mains go offline. It takes about 20 seconds to come up to a stable voltage and transfer the building load, so my UPSs (both desktop and rack-mount) hold everything up until the transfer switch kicks over. It's nice... it's worked great for the few times a T-storm has knocked out power (the last outage was when some kid took out a power pole with his vehicle).

Surge protectors are useless in my country, except as extra sockets. Everything gets fried, not just the surge protector. Your power quality is that bad? Geez...

That's sort of what I meant by power problems. I wouldn't have a UPS that doesn't do some voltage regulation. The backup power is a bonus. When I used to live in S. Florida, thunderstorms were a daily occurrence, particularly during the summer. I lost more hard drives and PSUs before I started putting everything on UPS. I never regretted it... I just change out the batteries when they wear out.

There's no excuse not to have a quality UPS for your delicate electronics. You don't have to have a full-on 7ft rack and a huge datacenter UPS, but you should at least have a consumer-grade APC or something. Power problems are one of the major killers of PCs and electronic systems, probably second only to heat.

Soundy is correct; don't worry about the ground wire. RS 485 is a two-wire connection.

Indeed... I was fairly bummed when it went down. Good to see everyone back!

Are these still available?

I should have known any loose sh*t on my part would be corrected by you fine gentlemen. You're right, of course... those are F-connectors. I will be more precise the next time.

These are some of the connectors you're likely to see. From left to right: female coax to female coax female BNC to male RCA male BNC to female RCA male BNC to male BNC male BNC to female coax male 2.5mm barrel connector (used for 12v DC) female 2.5mm barrel connector (again, used for 12v DC) The latter two are what you will use to pass power to your cameras, like so. I've circled the two connectors that come out of the bullet camera in the center. The top one is the 12v barrel connector, and the bottom one is the BNC-female connector for video. If the connector they're using looks like a glorified phone plug or S-video cable, I'd get something else.

Yes... changing out the hard drives on SOME dm units can be done. I actually did mine (went from 80GB to dual-300GB drives... a huge improvement), but it took a bit of trial and error (and a firmware update) to make it all work right. I'm pretty sure there are instructions in these forums on how to make the switch... do a search and see if you can find it.

Pretty sure, Soundy. The DS2 has four serial ports on the back, and #3 and #4 can be used for RS-485 telemetry (the first two don't do RS-485, only RS-232). Serial ports 3&4 use pin #1 for TX+ and Pin #9 for TX- Page 21 in this PDF shows the pin-out: http://dedicatedmicros.icentera.com/exLink.asp?5971824OA71K75I27147120

The DS2s also allow you to use the serial port connections on the back to control RS485 cameras. It's pins 1 and 9. I hacked up an old serial cable end when I had my DS2 installed, and simply used one of the pairs from some cat5 I'd already run. The cable can be improvised... you may be able do it with 18ga 2-conductor power wire (I tried that on a short run, and it worked). Naturally, twisted pair is better and more interference-resistant. You can daisy-chain all your RS485 devices together. The trick with RS485 is assigning all the cameras their appropriate address on the bus, and terminating it at the last camera.

Hah! Blowing up capacitors was great fun. We used to do that in my basement... until one of the metal caps hit the overhead light fixture hard enough to break the flourescent tube. That was the end of that.

Holy cow... I was a small-time electronics geek compared to some of you gentlemen. I thought I was ate up...

Kickbacks? Who do you think you are, the Governor of Illinois?

I know exactly what you mean, Scorpion; I loved Radio Shack as a kid. I actually dreamed of working there once I got old enough to work. I ended up mowing lawns and cleaning offices instead (that's probably for the best... I would have spent every dollar I made at Radio Shack on gear). Their parts selection used to be top-notch... and you could get all those great electronic project kits (the 100-in-1 was my favorite... I made all kinds of cool stuff with that thing).

The battery-of-the-month club was one of the best things Rip-off Shack ever did.

I switched from a DS2 to a PC-based solution (self-built), and I couldn't be happier. My DS2 didn't do megapixel, was a pain-in-the-arse to upgrade, and the quality of the encoded pictures could have been better. I went with an IBM thinkcentre SFF desktop (core2 duo 2.13mhz) with a couple of 1.2Tb drives, and a couple of axis camera servers. I evaluated Video Insight, Exacqvision, Nuuo, and LuxRiot. I ended up going with the latter, and have been pretty happy with it. I also only run about 40% CPU load with 10 cameras (eight analog sources connected to two axis servers), a megapixel Acti cam, and a VGA Axis vandal dome). That's with running motion detection on about half of the cameras, and it gives me plenty of upgrade room to do a planned addition of a Mobotix or Arecont day/night camera. Embedded is nice if you're not a techno-weenie. If you ARE a techno-weenie, not having control of the hardware gets old quickly, as you look to expand capability, add memory, change out processors, add video cards, upgrade your network to gigabit, change NVR software... whatever. Yes, rolling your own is more work, but in my opinion, it's definitely worth it.

That is classic! I love spiders (have my undergraduate degree in Zoology), and we have some members of the orb weavers in my area that produce huge, beautiful webs. Unfortunately, they like to spin them in areas where insects congregate... and at night, that would be in front of your IR sources. Another great reason to use illuminators.

I did some training some years ago with Detroit SWAT... you couldn't pay me enough to live there.

That one on the right can be adjusted from spot to flood. There's a little set screw on the side, and the IR element inside moves forward or backward relative to that lens assembly you see on the end. Move it forward for wider angle, or backward for narrow beam. They're cheap on Ebay... 40-50 bucks or so. Just do a search for "IR illuminator"... you'll see all sorts of different versions (some of the higher-powered ones are about $100). The lower-powered ones get significantly warm during operation, so I don't know how much I'd trust the high-powered ones not to burn out on you. Just a thought.