The IT Nerd

As you know, I was robbed this week. But we have pictures of the scumbags question thanks to our motion sensitive camera. A reader by the name of “A.J.” asked how he can set a similar system up. The reality is, it’s not that hard.

The camera setup comes from a company called Axis and the specific camera I am using is this one. It’s a wireless camera and it has a built in distro of Linux that has an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. The protocol used to send your e-mail) server, web server and custom Java based software to detect motion and light changes. Basically you can configure the camera via a web page to monitor a specific area and if there’s any motion or light changes in that area, it sends you an e-mail with pictures attached. In my case, it goes to my BlackBerry. You can also route video through the webserver and access it live via a web page. I have a static IP so I set up my router to route port 80 to the internal IP of the camera (which is also static). That means that you can log into camera via the static IP address and see what’s going on live.

In my case, the camera is mounted on the roof and aimed at the door to our condo. I set up the motion sensing software to focus on the door. If the door moves or the light changes, an e-mail get sent. So in our case, it caught the break in as well as 6 of Toronto’s finest entering my place with guns drawn.

Setting it up will take a couple of hours out of your day to have it working correctly, plus you’ll need to test the e-mail capabilities and the video web page using an external Internet account. Plus you’ll need to tweak it so that random light changes (like lights flickering) doesn’t set the camera off every five minutes.

One thing to note is that I have lights on a “old school” timer system so that they flip on when the ambient light gets dark. That’s because the camera doesn’t have night vision of any sort. There are Axis cameras that do support night vision and if that’s an issue for you, Axis likely has the product that fits your needs.

Just to warn you, the camera isn’t cheap. I paid over $400 CDN for it. But Axis are the people you want to go to for IP based video security. If you see a camera at a shopping center or someplace else, chances are it’s an Axis product. Their cameras come highly recommended.

Hopefully I’ve explained how the system works. But if you’ve got questions, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them.

This entry was posted on June 17, 2009 at 8:59 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.