Re: Norhtec computer for security camera

It is not an outdoor camera. The wooden box just has an open front and
is not heated, but it stays dry. An appropriate caption for a picture of
my installation might be "Redneck Security System". I believe it has
survived 2 winters and 3 summers so far, with very few problems. I have
had to reboot it a couple of times, and that's all.

If you don't have to shoot through much vegetation and you're within a
couple hundred feet, you might get the wireless version to work. Power
input is 5VDC so you could probably get away with rotating a couple of 6
volt batteries.

I'm actually just north of Kelly Lake adjacent to 'Camp Ladasa'.

Bob at Estiminc wrote:
> Very interesting, Jim. Great shots of your intruders. (Looks like we
> are neighbors. I'm on Crystal Lake.)
> I was wondering about the camera you bought from gadspot.com. Is it
> an outdoor camera? Or if not, did you put some kind of heater in the
> tree-mounted wood box you installed it in? If possible, I'd like to
> avoid the extension cord and cat-5.
>
>
>
>> Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 10:45:17 -0800
>> From: Jim Courtney <courtney@ieee.org>
>> Subject: Re: Norhtec computer for security camera
>>
>> I played with the 'motion' software several years ago and liked how it
>> was able to use a cheap usb webcam to generate enough frames to make
>> decent movie clips of motion events. As you say, the difficulty outdoors
>> is wind. For the past couple of years I have used a cheap $100 IP camera
>>
> >from gadspot.com inside of a wooden box bungeed to spruce tree so I can
>
>> review what goes on in my driveway. It's connected with a couple hundred
>> feet of extension cord and cat-5. It ftp's jpegs to my server when the
>> picture changes. It sees infrared and has build-in infrared LED's, and I
>> also have an external infrared LED illuminator, but that has still
>> proved effective only within a few feet (bats and moths). Unless it is
>> extremely windy, which is rare, I can easily pick out the interesting
>> pictures because of the consecutive timestamps in the filenames. This
>> camera runs linux internally and has an external input and output. You
>> have the option to put an infrared motion or other type of sensor on the
>> input and trigger the camera that way. The bad thing is that some of the
>> config options can only be set with ActiveX controls, but IE under Wine
>> works for that. You also need IE to view and capture full-motion video
>> with the built-in web server. That may have changed in the last couple
>> of years though.
>>
>> Here's my best driveway shots for the last couple of years:
>>
>> http://nancylake.com/dwpics
>>
>> Another outdoor option is an infrared motion-sensing battery-powered
>> trail camera. Even a cheap one takes pretty good pictures, with or
>> without automatic flash, or in infrared.
>>
>> Here's a pinhead somebody recently caught with a night-vision trailcam
>> as he was allegedly siphoning gas:
>>
>> http://nancylake.com/gasthief.jpg
>>
>
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Received on Sun Sep 16 09:44:30 2007