Case For Setting Up a Low Cost Home Surveillance System

Leave my Obama sticker alone!

When car thieves stole my GPS, I was pissed. When they struck again and stole my Obama car mag­net, I knew I had to do some­thing.  Who knew crooks had polit­i­cal affiliations!

Prior to this inci­dent, I knew noth­ing about sur­veil­lance sys­tems. But this gave me an oppor­tu­nity to research this area and apply my new found knowl­edge to serve one pur­pose — watch over my car! This, and sub­se­quent posts are a brain dump of what I learnt about low cost home sur­veil­lance systems.

There are tons of home sur­veil­lance sys­tems in the mar­ket. Some are way too expen­sive and the cheap ones woe­fully under­per­form.  There are two kinds of sur­veil­lance sys­tems. CCTV based and IP based.  CCTV based are the tra­di­tional ones where the out­put is sent to  a TV/VCR and recorded in a VHS tape.  IP cam­eras typ­i­cally have a web­server run­ning in them and the out­put is saved on a hard disk.  For the lay­man — CCTV based cam­eras are ana­log, IP based cam­eras are digital.

Quest for the almost per­fect sur­veil­lance camera

After spend­ing numer­ous hours research­ing sur­veil­lance sys­tems, I set­tled on the Pana­sonic BL-C131A. For the price, this is prob­a­bly the best you can get. Here are some cool things you can do with this camera:

• Imag­ine know­ing exactly when a pack­age was left at your doorstep — a snap­shot in your inbox, no less!
• Let­ting your grand­par­ents, who are miles away, lis­ten and watch your baby
• Check­ing on your pets via your Blackberry
• Look­ing at your house while on vaca­tion in China!
• You can even pan and tilt the cam­era remotely via  a web browser over the inter­net and even lis­ten in on what’s happening!

I’ll be post­ing a detailed tuto­r­ial on how to achieve each of the above in the com­ing weeks.  I’ll try to keep the posts as non tech­ni­cal as possible.

What I cap­tured through my cam­era made me call the cops!

I’ve setup my IP cam­era so that it cap­tures any motion detected from 11:00 at night to 6:00 in the morn­ing and ftp’s the movie to a remote ftp site and save a copy on my lap­top as well.  I was review­ing the pre­vi­ous night’s clips and one par­tic­u­lar clip cap­tured at around 3:30am caught my eye. If you watch the clip below, you’ll notice an SUV approach­ing my car, slow­ing down, and it looks like the dri­ver is using a flash­light to check inside  my car and my neighbor’s car. Of course I called the cops!

But this inci­dent has a per­fectly log­i­cal expla­na­tion!  I’ll tell you what exactly hap­pened in my next post!