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!
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