Last year I
installed two solar powered independent surveillance cameras that are linked via WiFi to our central surveillance system
. This year, after monitoring the power consumption of these two cameras, I've determined that the solar panels and batteries I configured for each camera should be able to support an additional camera each.
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| A close up view of the components of a camera system. A normal CCTV camera enclosure makes a nice weatherproof housing for the system. Inside there's basically just an HD webcam, a Raspberry Pi computer, a DC to DC converter, and a USB extension cable. The only specialized item in this setup is a small printed circuit board I etch for the DC to DC converter. One end of the USB extension cable, which passes outside of the enclosure through its grommet, is embedded with epoxy in the lid of an empty plastic pill bottle (lower left corner of image). With a tiny Edimax Wi-Fi dongle plugged in and the bottle screwed in place, the pill bottle makes a very effective waterproof Wi-Fi dongle housing. It's childproof too! |
Each camera's operating system is simply a clone of one of the existing surveillance cameras with a few minor post-cloning modifications. Modifications include: assigning a new manual ip address in /etc/network/interfaces, changing the ftp folder destination for captured images being transferred to the central surveillance station, and changing the 'text_left' camera number in /etc/motion/motion.conf.
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| The six video camera feeds as they appear on my laptop. |
In addition to the surveillance system's automated motion-activated imagery capture and transmission processes, I am also able to view the video feeds live when connected to the local Wi-Fi network. In other words, I can watch the video in real-time on my laptop while sitting in my camper trailer.
