Hi from the Inland Empire in Southern California

[StevesWeb]

Hello folks,

I'm a noob to Blue Iris software, and very favorably impressed, but I'm an old hand at geeking around with computers. I build my own websites and my own web servers, and have a web hosting hobby that appears to resemble a web hosting business.

True story: In 1978 I was doing field upgrades of Teletype machines to 300 bit per second modems. The original modems were rated at 0~110 bps.

More recently I built a pair of solar powered IP webcams using Raspberry Pi computers. We need a remote camera to be able to see our driveway gate from the house, the gate is down the hill and around a bend.

For years I settled for a highly unreliable freeware webcam package, switching to Blue Iris has been an enormous relief. I'm very impressed. Blue Iris is doing a fantastic job of recognizing and recording people and cars with a minimum of tress blowing around triggering detection, and this is out of the box with no tweaking. Clearly this is very well thought out software.

You can call me Steve.

Here is my home made webcam installation.

 

[bp2008]

So, inside those camera enclosures are raspberry pi + camera modules?

How did you get the network back to the house? Or is this a standalone system that requires you to plug in to pull video?

Very nice looking setup, by the way. Smaller than I expected for a suitable battery.

 

[StevesWeb]

So, inside those camera enclosures are raspberry pi + camera modules?

How did you get the network back to the house? Or is this a standalone system that requires you to plug in to pull video?

Yes, each camera enclosure has a Raspberry pi and a DC-DC buck converter, and I did use the Raspberry Pi camera modules. I find they are excellent cameras, 5MP native, I'm taking 1920 by 1080 slices and serving them with an MJPEG streaming package and Apache un Raspbian Linux. Each camera also has a tiny WiFi USB dongle (EdiMax brand). I mounted a WiFi router in bridge mode under the eaves of our house with a line of sight to the cameras. The enclosures were sold as fake cameras, one with a solar powered blinking LED, the other battery powered. I guessed I might be able to fit a Raspberry pi in there, and got lucky. I had to use the GPIO connector to supply power as a micr-USB cable made the assembly too wide.

The panel is rated 100 watts and is monocrystalline. The battery is an 18ah AGM sealed, and of course there is a charge controller in there too.

I usually walk by there every morning just before sunrise when the power is at its daily minimum and it usually only drops to 12.6 or 12.5 volts, so I may have over-engineered it - on purpose

It was a fun project.

Very nice looking setup, by the way. Smaller than I expected for a suitable battery.

Thanks!

 

[The_Penguin]

Here is my home made webcam installation.

Wow, very cool! Thanks for sharing.