Limited power, large lot.

C

ClubMakati

n3wb
Nov 3, 2022
5
7
USA
Hi Everyone,

TL/DR: Looking for a camera with local SD storage, and/or possibly cell coverage, that is capable of seeing license plates. Can use 12v, but no internet or wired option at the moment for storage. Are there any options beside trail cams?

We use a gated property that is not remote, but due to some city infrastructure and right of way surrounding, we cannot add power. Moving is not an option. The landlord has a little power ran underground as there are two light poles and the gate and some old cameras on the poles (DBB54TL Summit Series). I took one of those cams off, it has 12v connection cable and coax running into the pole. But landlord unwilling to give us access to whatever is in his building nearby, i.e. NVR or computer etc. So for now we have no real power or internet.

Need a camera or two for 24 hour vehicle entry/exit pictures or videos, does not need to be live or continuous although wouldn't mind that. For now camera is to look back and make determinations and/or verifications of activity. LPR setup might be down the road but not necessary for now. Looking for any ideas or advice.

1. Best option to convince landlord into giving us access, but don't know if he will. This would give me lots of options, I've been browsing other areas of this site, wikis, and sticky posts, etc in case I can get this going.

2. I tried a Tactacam RevealX trail cam on the pole, but during daytime with a gate open the vehicles move too quickly for a good image. Might have to stick with this though it seems, just finding better angle.

3. My main question is what to do if I can't get the landlord to allow access to the other end of the coax cable. Any recommends for a camera with local SD storage that could see license plates besides trail cams? I see a lot of cameras in the license plate reader forum, but everything seems to be internet or wired. When I search for SD cameras, it seems mostly to be as a backup or maybe I'm just misunderstanding, but having a hard time seeing something that actually doesn't need either internet or wired storage and would fit my situation. I'll keep looking.

Thanks for any ideas or thoughts. Reading as much as I can here and elsewhere but been a few weeks and can't make up my mind, need to make a choice soon as we had a few incidents with business picking up on the property.
 
Most of the cameras you read about here do not need internet.

The SD cards are for storage, though most here have it as backup to a supplemental VMS like an NVR or BI.

Everybody is looking for that unicorn and it simply doesn't exist unless you have the room to put up something the size of half a volkswagon to power it by solar and battery LOL.

Storage or not, nobody here will recommend a consumer grade solar wifi camera.

Plenty of threads discussing it. Here are few. A consumer grade camera will not cut it and you would have to build your own with battery packs taking up the size of half a VW lol. The cost to do it right far exceeds the cost of running wire.

1668994873462.png

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Feasibility of license plate reading at my house
I live on a corner of a kind of busy road and quiet neighborhood street. If possible, I'd like to place a camera that was able to capture license plates of cars coming and going. There is a stop sign, so it should be pretty easy to capture I would think. The issues are that I don't have ethernet...



Trail cams won't cut it, especially at night.

Regarding plates, keep in mind that this is a camera dedicated to plates and not an overview camera also. It is as much an art as it is a science. You will need two cameras. For LPR we need to OPTICALLY zoom in tight to make the plate as large as possible. For most of us, all you see is the not much more than a vehicle in the entire frame. Now maybe in the right location during the day it might be able to see some other things, but not at night.

At night, we have to run a very fast shutter speed (1/2,000) and in B/W with IR and the image will be black. All you will see are head/tail lights and the plate. Some people can get away with color if they have enough street lights, but most of us cannot. Here is a representative sample of plates I get at night of vehicles traveling about 45MPH at 175 feet from my 2MP 5241-Z12E camera (that is all that is needed for plates):

1668994729936.png
 
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But it sounds like you have the old analog coax cable there, so with one of these you can turn it into an IP camera.



But if you can't get to the other end in the building, then use the 12VDC that that connection will give you to power up an IP camera and then use an ubiquity nanostation to beam the data to your place provided you have a clear line of site (provided that the nanostation could be ran by that same power with an adapter).
 
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wittaj said:
Plenty of threads discussing it. Here are few. A consumer grade camera will not cut it and you would have to build your own with battery packs taking up the size of half a VW lol. The cost to do it right far exceeds the cost of running wire.

You will need two cameras.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I had seen a few of those threads but clearly didn't search well enough and thought my situation was more unique than I am.

I have read a bunch of the lpr threads, and am aware I would need two cameras. I was wondering about the lfr though, if I had a camera focused on the spot where the fleet vehicle numbers were instead of license plates, is there any reason I wouldn't be able to use the same software or program to recognize and record those numbers? That would be in some cases more useful to me, so I might plan a third camera for that.

wittaj said:
But it sounds like you have the old analog coax cable there, so with one of these you can turn it into an IP camera.



But if you can't get to the other end in the building, then use the 12VDC that that connection will give you to power up an IP camera and then use an ubiquity nanostation to beam the data to your place provided you have a clear line of site (provided that the nanostation could be ran by that same power with an adapter).
Click to expand...

I finally had time to go talk with the landlord, holiday rush at work has me lagging on this. He agreed cameras would be beneficial, and will let me put a modem and nvr or machine for BI in their utilities room where their equipment is, he just didn't want to run any more cable underground to the property. So I am looking at trying those adapters. I had seen the ubiquiti option and will keep that as a backup plan but it looks like for now I'll try to use the coax.

Thanks again for the comments.
 
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Hi all, back again with an update. Obviously I posted this thread in a rush and as a new guy, and since then have been reading as much as I can to get a better grasp on things before asking more. I now have the start of a plan, so I updated the title of the thread as I clearly do have some power and internet options as instructed in the replies above. I'll post my plan here, I'm open to any and all comments, or if nobody has comments maybe can just show how I go about this. Also business has grown a bit, so I have to jump in soon even if I don't know as much as I'd like.

First pic is of the lot with old tenant still there before we moved in. Red diamonds to highlight light poles.
Screenshot (26).png

Quick summary - this is about a 6 acre lot, with one access point across train tracks on the upper right in the pictures below. I'd call it an 18/5 rather than 24/7 lot, but really some minor use at all hours is possible. Road is just at the edge of the pic on the right side. It is a fenced and gated property. Left and top sides are neighbors. Right side curving down to the bottom side is a train track. Its just a spur, almost completely unused at the moment, with a dirt road along it heading to some other lots further to the left and on the bottom. Landlord's bldg is at bottom right and has some cameras on back belonging to a tenant in a portion of the bldg.

For power, we have 4 light poles. Adding more power is prohibitively expensive going over/under train tracks, especially as we might only be here a year or two more while trying to find our own place. Each of these poles has two older "flir" cheap cameras with coax. Won't use obviously but I do believe that gives me the power and connections I need using the link shared to me above for turning coax into ethernet over coax. I've marked these as 1 through 4 going left to right for reference. I don't know much about splitters and if it is possible or will overtax what's there so sticking with 2 cams per pole for now is my thought. You can kind of see the shadow of two power poles, these though are higher capacity wires we can't tie in on.

My objectives have changed on this property somewhat. I was initially concerned about theft and intruders along the fences, or through the gate. While still a concern, I am quickly finding my bigger issue is keeping track of legitimate vehicles entering and exiting the property, so I can keep track of who is coming and going. And as third party vehicles will soon be using my lot more, keeping track of this is my main objective currently. With cameras only on one side of the lot, it's not ideal but I think I can accomplish a lot and will have to do with that for now. Mostly it will be LPR along with wide anlge and some PTZ I think to "Detect, Observe and Recognize", not as much "Identify" but hopefully LPR helps with that if needed. Also my ideal scenario, which I don't know if would be possible, is to eventually have not just LPR but also finding a way to have the AI track vehicle fleet numbers. Uncertain how realistic that is without spending a fortune.
Here is a diagram without the image of the old tenant's vehicles.
Screenshot (27).png


Plan:
Green are Dahua 5442 for LPR
Blue are 180 degree wide angle cams
Orange are PTZ
These are general ideas, I haven't researched camera types yet really other than seeing the 5442 almost universally named for LPR. Please forgive the inexact angles of camera views and scale etc.

Screenshot (28).png

Pole #4:
This pole is closest to the gate. 19ft to middle of the driveway measured at in a line, and 24 ft to the center of the gate. My plan is 5442 cams for LPR. Would like to have a wider angle as well here, maybe 180 degree camera I've seen shots of that I like. If the LPR has issues, I would replace, but for now I'd like to try and get LPRs set up here as don't see a way to do it from other locations. One for inbound and one for outbound traffic. Very bright lights focused on gate area at night, fyi.

Pole #3:
Some departing traffic comes past here and as it approaches the gate, I'm not sure the LPR for outbound flow would work at the gate so I have planned another LPR here. Second camera here would be a 180 degree cam so I get the bigger picture of everyone coming and going into the lot, although angle and obstructions would mean probably not quite see the actual gate itself in the wide angle.

Pole #2:
I'd like to have another wide angle view here, as well as maybe a PTZ so I can on demand look around to see if the vehicles I need to know about are on site, etc.

Pole #1:
More intruder focus here with a wide angle pointed back towards the tracks and our fence line that is not bordering another facility. My diagram isn't exact here but with 180 degrees I can see a lot of that area I think, and with the other tenant having cameras in the back of the landlord bldg I think it's a decent compromise. Then a second PTZ facing inward to check on what is happening in the lot.

Issues:
My distances and angles are not perfect on some of these. If I could get all outbound traffic from pole 4, it would obviously be ideal but not sure the angle works without a third camera there. Also there can from time to time be obstructions in the way, so I'm not sure of the value of wide angle in that case. I might try to put the cameras higher than the old ones to limit that, but also then they'll be close to the lights above, not sure if that will hurt image quality. And the poles are not too tall anyway. Obviously not having anything on the other side of the property is a bummer. But not looking to bury cable or run anything to that side just yet. I'm open to comments though on how much benefit that could bring, so that I can budget for it and plan how soon I could really do it. But that would be awhile I think before I can accomplish that.

Thanks for any thoughts.
 
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