Roast My Design Plan, Or Suggest Improvements :)

Jul 1, 2016
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1
New home build going up and a few weeks away from getting ethernet installed. Will be installing myself. Home is on an 18 acre lot, private road with few neighbors and few traffic. Wooded lot with a few acres cleared. Moving from a congested area and want some camera coverage for a few objectives:

1. ID People or cars coming in the driveway to the best of our ability
2. General yard views, watch the dogs when they are outside, wildlife, etc,
3. Package view for porch
4. Whatever entryway coverage I can get, main doors primarily.

Accessibility to the house is only available from the front, unless someone is going to hike through the woods to come from sides or back. Roofline is about 10' from lowest part, fairly tall from gable ends ~18'. Walls are precast concrete, gable ends framed. Its a slab on grade with vaulted through most so adding ethernet later will be cumbersome, but still possible. Trying to get locations wired for current and potential future needs to try and save me some hassle!



Cams 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 I was originally considering the dual/180 degree cams: IPC-Color4k-T180. I figured they would be decent for the general viewpoints, understanding they wont be useful for ID'ing people most likely.
Not sure on Cam 1...
Likely need to add a couple of longer focal lengths for pointing at the driveway/road entry area. Maybe a couple of repositioned or different cameras for the entryway doors..,.

Open to any/all suggestions or comments.
 

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How much light do you plan to have around the property at night? The Color4K-T180 do not see IR and will need a reasonable amount of ambient light to see anything at night, unless you want to run the onboard LEDs. I would expect you wouldn't want your house lit up like Ft. Knox since you moved from congestion, so definitely something to consider.
 
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Haha honestly I thought it had decent performance in low light. Thanks for the heads up, definitely not planning to keep the area lit! Moonlight is really the only thing going.
 
Haha honestly I thought it had decent performance in low light. Thanks for the heads up, definitely not planning to keep the area lit! Moonlight is really the only thing going.
They are good in low light, but still require adequate light for usable captures.

You will likely need to run some T54IR and IR floods. My backyard is dark, but you would think it's lit fairly well because of the Tendelux IR flood lights.

T54IR with IR floods.
Back_Yard, North 2024-11-29 01.10.59.337 AM.jpg

Reality, from a Color4K-T on the deck. You can see how dark the yard is to the right of the stone.
Deck 2024-08-02 11.08.48.582 PM.jpg
 
I'm also just starting out, so take my thoughts with a pinch of salt... I've just received the T54IR-ZE-S3 from Andy at Empiretech and haven't yet had a chance to play with them set them up.

I went with the varifocal option because I'm not yet sure how "zoomed in" I can get away with and still have a FOV that will cover the drive. The T54IR has DORI identify specs of 5.8m (19ft) to 13.1m (43ft).

With single camera points on each wall, to cover c.180°, you'll be so "zoomed out", you won't get much detail/distance; the specs on the T54IR say 115° horizontal field of view when zoomed out, and 47° when zoomed in

Hard to see from the pics what the Topo is like, is there a direct line of site to the junction from the corner of the garage? I'd imagine you'll still need some kind of IR spotlight, at 170ft distance the T54IR is only rated as "observe"...

Is it possible to run power and ethernet to nearer the junction?

I made a "floorplan" of my house in PowerPoint and added triangles with width to height ratios based on field of view Vs DORI, it really helped me get a feel for what sort of coverage I was getting. You've already a layout so most of the hard work is done!
 
Cams 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 I was originally considering the dual/180 degree cams: IPC-Color4k-T180. I figured they would be decent for the general viewpoints, understanding they wont be useful for ID'ing people most likely.
Not sure on Cam 1...
Likely need to add a couple of longer focal lengths for pointing at the driveway/road entry area. Maybe a couple of repositioned or different cameras for the entryway doors..,.

Open to any/all suggestions or comments.

A few days ago there was thread where someone wanted to use only 180 degrees cams (fixed and PTZ + panorama).
Read my replies there, there is no sense to duplicate why 180 cams are bad idea.

 
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