[XCSSA] Do-It-Yourself Home Surveillance

[X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio]

> I am curious though, are those cams running on 802.11G?  And if so.. what's
> that do to the rest of your WLAN connectivity?

I'm using dlink 900 cams I'm buying surplus and on ebay for about $70
or so a pop... they only have a 802.11b radio in them... a single cam
uses about a megabit of bandwidth... so you run about 5 of them on one
AP and one RF channel... I eventually switched a a wired set up for
them using PoE adapters and thats works really well.

The only issue with the 900 cams is the optics... I may tear one a
part to see if I can swap the lens with something thats wider angle.


> So how do you interact with it Richard? You use a smart phone with it at all?
> Does it scale well with mobile devices?
> Interested in driving up to SA for a presentation? :)

I typically don't look at the cams much unless I need to (ie,
something happened around the house).  So far nothing has been an
issue.  I have a small set up at my office that uses a single cam
pointed at the door - and we've only used to make sure that janitorial
was actually coming in to clean the office... but its always using a
browser on a local lan... for awhile i played with viewing them using
a pocketpc phone and an iphone and they seem to both work fine for
stills but the video never worked (of course).

I really like ZM... but if you look at some of the new security DVR's
you'll find that the ZM UI is actually pretty bad...  I'm probably
going to take the ZM stuff out of service and replace it with a
commerical DVR - I'm finding they aren't all that expensive.... like
you can get a 16-channel DVR for about a grand or so...

-Richard

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