Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: internet, video, surveillance | Themes: Digital Cameras
13. Linksys Video Camera
The Linksys WVC210 is close to my ideal wireless home-security camera. It’s quick and easy to setup, has a camera that can tilt and pan under its clear dome, and has a wireless range of about 120 feet. This should be plenty for the typical home. Best of all, it’s not too expensive.
Before you decide where it should go, set the camera up, plug in its power supply, and connect it to your network router using an Ethernet cable. Run the CD’s set up program, which finds the camera so you can enter your wireless network’s ID and encryption keys.
Rather using the router’s DHCP automatic IP addressing, I use static IP addressing. Pick an address such as 192.168.1.99 and enter it when you’re asked. After you click okay, unplug the Ethernet cable and restart the camera.
Type http://192.168.1.99 (or whatever address you chose) into a Web browser to bring up the camera’s interface and click on the View Video tab on the top left. It should open up what the camera is seeing. Aim it with the arrows in the upper-left corner or click on the icon that looks like two arrowheads to get the camera to pan back and forth or use the icon with three points connected by a circle to run an automatic pattern up, down, right, or left to cover the room.
A big bonus is that the camera not only has a microphone so you can listen in on your kids, but a jack for a speaker so that you can use it as an intercom.
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Zonemider FTW
While all this is certainly useful and true, there are other ways in which you can do it on more of a budget. You might also want to factor in the cost of a dedicated PC for this too since that software will probably use up a fair chunk of CPU cycles.
My security system is far more budget but nevertheless gets the job done. I've got a cheap old 17" Intel iMac with a broken screen hidden away in the garage. I then have a 10m USB extension cable (with a signal booster) going across the garage to a Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro that's beet waterproofed and has been installed in my front porch. I then run Periscope (http://www.freeverse.com/apps/app/?id=7002) on the iMac and have set it set up to take a camera shot every time movement is detected and save it to disk. You can set it to email you if movement is detected if you like or to ftp the shots up to a server but an outside camera detects soooo much movement that you'd quickly fill your inbox.
As an added security measure, when I go away, I run Periscope on my desktop machine as well although this time its set up to email me if movement is detected (which is fine, since its indoors).
This set up cost me $25 for the Periscope software per machine and about $100 for the outside webcam (although they're much cheaper in the states). The usb extension cable was about $15. My desktop machine already had a webcam so I didn't need anything there and the garage machine cost me $170.
So all in all, my setup cost a little over $300. I plan on adding an extra webcam to the back of the house via another USB extension cable or via a USB over CAT5 adapter, connected to the garage machine, which would cost me roughly an added $140.
I can also stream/record the video from the webcams by splitting the signals with CamTwist and by using QuickTime Broadcaster / YouStream. The novelty of that wore off pretty fast though and I choose to save the CPU time for other more useful things.
Of course, I'm sure there are similar camera motion monitoring software packages out there for Windows and Linux so you could easily build a cheap dual core garage computer for what I paid for my one and then the other components would cost roughly the same.
This is all too much effort for the results - check out the lowest price security DVRs, I saw a four camera input for $160 - spend the money on better cameras - http://www.gadspot.com/product_inf [...] cts_id=202