Homebrew Cctv

[Rich]

I think my main reason for having the cctv is confirmation that when my alarm goes off and I am contacted that I can quickly check whether it was not a false alarm. Also there is the detterrent feature as well. I would assume that most burglars would dress up or cover their faces so not sure what value the pictures would have.

So in conclusion two fold 1) to check for false alarm and 2) as a deterrent

I would want to cover the back of the house. I am sure that I can place a camera at the level of my upstairs window which will provide a full view of the area under most risk. As my kitchen is extended it has many windows so these are the main areas to cover.

Then possibly a camera to the front to monitor the front door but I do not expect a break in from the front as I live on a fairly busy road and you can see my house from a fair way out.

You shouldn't have a problem achieveing reasonable cover but I am not sure about getting the images sent to your mobile. If you are likely to have access to the internet from a PC then this shouldnt be a problem.

You have a choice for the cameras, either a housed camera on a bracket or a camera fitted into a dome housing.

If you back garden is well lit at night or you have a motion sensor light then a standard day/night camera should be fine. You will find alot that have LED's built in to light up the area in darkness, these cameras are fairly hit and miss and are not something I would use if I could help it.

http://www.alliedsecurity.co.uk/internalcamsmore.htm the cameras at the bottom called the Nite Devil are very good, especially if you have very little light in your back garden. Halogen lamps only help unwanted visitors see better and are unlikely to stop someone trying to break in, but these cameras will give you a colour image in virtually no light. at

[silicon skum]

The above advice is spot on, but if you are just looking for a visual deterant and possibly a simple image that lets you see if there is a person(s) in your grounds, and image capture quality and frame rate is not TOO important.....Then you could do a fairly decent setup using a couple of fairly expensive (about

[silicon skum]

lol yeah itll be cheap i suppose. Love to know how you get on long term with it mind

Actually, It's been installed and running for 2 years and running 24 / 7. Never really had any problems with it. Like I said, it depends what you want from a CCTV camera system, mine is just used to monitor the front door so I can avoid opening the door to the Jehovah's witness lot, and see who called at my house when I'm out. The back yard camera is only used to let me know if anyone hops over my rear wall, mostly local kids looking for a ball and the scroates who keep trying to nick waste copper left over from my job (I weigh it in myself). Actually it was only a few days ago my camera caught one local scrapper jumping over my wall and nicking some waste copper pipe and a couple of reels of copper cable. Had a good enough image of him and the ford pickup, that I could identify who it was (and he's only a few streets away from my house). lets just say payback can be a bitch....

The setup I have consists of some pretty high-end hardware and custom software ( a freebie, as I do some "testing" for a friend in the USA, who installs this profesionaly - can't really say what it is, due to an NDA, but it's based on quite a well known bit of kit in the states), which monitors the inside of my house, the webcams are just something I stuck on as an afterthought. They are just simple USB connections to the server, and the software is able to monitor the feeds just as well as any other type of camera.

Have to be honest, I'm not sure how well something like this would work with an average home PC though. If it's not a "life ot death" situation, I don't see why you could get "something" workable out of it though. A web enabled mobile phone and a java applet running on a web page from a personal web server on the PC (built into some windows versions), and that would do the sort of thing the original poster is after. Plenty of free or comercial software products that can do this.

SS

[gladiator]

I might look into the Philips SPC 900C webcam based cctv but the problem is how decent the images are and how useful I will find them. I have a pir flood light in my back garden so I assume when that lights up the camera would have less problem in taking a decent image.

Could I build my own DVR - I have a spare server computer AMD 1800 , 512mb ram, 120gb h/d ?

[silicon skum]

I might look into the Philips SPC 900C webcam based cctv but the problem is how decent the images are and how useful I will find them.

<snip>

Could I build my own DVR - I have a spare server computer AMD 1800 , 512mb ram, 120gb h/d ?

Yeah you could build up a DVR system fairly easy, depending on how many cams you want, the AMD 1800 might be a little under powered, but should be useable for at least 2 seperate cams. You will need a much bigger hard drive, I use a dedicated pair of 300Gb drives (Plenty of space for continuous recording), but you could just use a single 200 - 300Gb drive and record in lower frame rate and / or lower resolution to save space. 120Gb would be enough if you only want to record when motion is detected or if you only intend to stream the video output to the web / your phone. Don't record the video to the same drive as the operating system (windows, linux etc.) uses, always uses a seperate physical drive for DVR functions! This way you will not lose important data due to a system crash.

I wouldn't use windows though, tends to get a bit "flakey" after a couple of days continuous uptime, Also windows does not support two IDENTICAL webcams at the same time, but you can use two DIFFERENT cams at the same time (even just different models numbers of the same make). Much better to use a Linux distro, suppports multiple identical cams, you can even run the entire system directly from a CDROM disk, so no worries about possible system crashes / data loss etc. If you are not confident enough to jump into linux and would prefere to use windows, then as long as you install it as a "minimal" install (remove EVERYTHING that is not needed, word pad, games, internet exporer etc.), you should be able to have a fairly stable system for long periods of uptime (still recomend you restart the computer at least once a month though, though you can schedule that task to perform automaticaly in windows).

As for the image quality, well here is a couple of screen shots:

640x480 resolution (taken from DVR server)

320x240 resolution (taken from stream to my PDA / phone), size reduced to save bandwith of connection.

Same as before, but at night (is clearer at 640x480 resolution). Taken in VERY low light levels from nearby street lights (they are not as bright as they appear) I also have a 300W PIR halogen installed, and provides more than enough light for a clear image.

The camera is not usually pointed up so high across the street, but the wind has been bad for the past few days and moved the camera angle up. Cam is installed in a cheapy "dummy" camera case I got off e-bay for

[gladiator]

So you installed a phillips webcam in a dummy housing outside?

Thats seems like a nifty idea. I mean I will be using the motion detection. I have no need to capture all the images just when there is movement. Also I will be pointing the camera at my extension and not into the street so the only movement that should be detected is either a cat or a burglar!

[luggsey]

I use a cheap Grandtech X card in my PC at home, runs two colour day/night bullet cameras and is on 24/7. Has good recording/motion detection/area blanking/remote alarm/remote web server. Not a cheap and nasty one but cheap and works very well. Got it at CPC, recomend you buy the best camera you can afford and I found when using DVR PC cards like mine they like the same type of camera on all inputs or the go a bit screwy on the picture and activate the motion detection.

[silicon skum]

So you installed a phillips webcam in a dummy housing outside?

Thats seems like a nifty idea. I mean I will be using the motion detection. I have no need to capture all the images just when there is movement. Also I will be pointing the camera at my extension and not into the street so the only movement that should be detected is either a cat or a burglar!

Yep, a cheap dumy case with flashing LED, ripped the battery holder for the LED out, and wired the LED to the circuit boad of the webcam which has an "active" status LED on it (or you could run it directly from the +5v and ground lines of the USB cable). I didn't realy need to remove the webcam case, but I did anyway, so I can also change the lens type if needed (uses a fairly standard thread on the lens, so plenty of options). I also have another spare lens which I initially used, I removed the IR blocking filter from the lens assembly so I could use an IR LED iluminator for night time, but it does make the picture look a little 'odd' in the daytime (some colours don't show correctly due to natural IR light from the sun). I swaped back to the standard IR blocking lens as the night vision was good enough anyway.

I mounted the camera outside, just below the bedroom window so adjustments are easy. looks the part too!

If you are just using motion detection only, then yeah a 120Gb drive will do fine. still recomend you use another seperate drive for storing video / still images though, it's safer and means that windows will not be accessing the drive while trying to record to it at the same time. Just bung in a cheap smaller drive for the windows install to go on, something like a 20 - 40Gb will be fine. Install the second hard drive onto it's own IDE chanel (not daisy chained to the other drive in master / slave combo) or use SATA drives. This will speed access up and allow two drives to be written / read at the same time.

The best part of using USB webcams is the fact it's cheap, simple and already used on PCs, so no aditional hardware needed - ideal if you just need something simple that works. Plenty of decent software for this, out there too.

SS

[gladiator]

I use a cheap Grandtech X card in my PC at home, runs two colour day/night bullet cameras and is on 24/7. Has good recording/motion detection/area blanking/remote alarm/remote web server. Not a cheap and nasty one but cheap and works very well. Got it at CPC, recomend you buy the best camera you can afford and I found when using DVR PC cards like mine they like the same type of camera on all inputs or the go a bit screwy on the picture and activate the motion detection.

Whose CPC? and how much did it all cost?

[luggsey]

Whose CPC? and how much did it all cost?

1st hit on Google.............

http://www.google.co.uk/pagead/iclk?sa=l&a...3DKNC-googlecpc

Cost,