Small Farm Project - 2 Buildings and Outdoor Area

[Webb Rousse]

Hello all. I am establishing a small farm in a rural area that requires 24/7 surveillance. I have attached 2 documents outlining the following:

1. Satellite image of area
2. Diagram of area outlining 3 locations for coverage (Building 1, Building 2 and Outdoor fenced-in Area)
3. Diagrams of 3 locations including proposed camera locations to ensure coverage.
4. My working draft of infrastructure required.

I will be establishing satellite internet to the location which will terminate in Building #1. Key challenges are as follows:

-Distance from North corner of Building 2 to furthest camera in Outdoor area is ~500 feet and over creek
-Regulatory requirements are 24x7 @ 1280x720 in all lighting conditions, Minimum 10 FPS, Onsite storage of video with continuous backup to offsite, 90 days onsite and 30 days offsite

With this I was wondering if a wireless camera solution would apply here based on distances and regulatory requirements. Can obviously cover the 2 buildings with wireless network but was wondering if their is a solution to extend the wireless in Building 2 to the outdoor area (~500 feet to furthest camera.) Also trying to figure out the storage on the video. Any insight to a potential solution, network architecture and specific camera equipment (Cameras, Video Appliance, Storage, etc..) would be appreciated.

Thanks

-webb

 

[NoloC]

Here's a link to one of the Ubiquity products with a very informative video from Nelly's.
Pre-Configured Pair of Ubiquiti Nano Station Loco M5 Wireless Access Points

They will pre configure for you at an additional charge. Otherwise they get 90 bucks for the pair. These work great, you will probably want 2.4ghz though as it is a bit better when LOS is not perfect.

So what type of crops?

Where's Nayr when you need him?

 

[TonyR]

+1 to @NoloC 's suggestion. I highly suggest running a wireless layer 2 transparent bridge between the two points using 2 Ubiquiti Nanostation Loco M5 radios. Once in and working you treat it like a run of Cat5e Ethernet cable. You would need good LOS (Line Of Sight) between the mounting points of the 2 prospective radio locations, 1 at house and other at remote camera location. Ubiquiti requires the use of STP in outdoor sections of cable as a condition of their warranty. I'd go with 5GHz unless there's some vegetation just ever so slightly impinging on good LOS, then 2.4GHz has a little more punch.

I am in Alabama as well and have about 4 of these installations that have made it through 3 years of our severe electrical storms without a hitch.

It takes a PC or laptop and about 15 minutes to up the 2 radios as below, 30 minutes worst case.
More help on the Layer 2 Transparent Bridge setup >> here <<==.

Here's one I installed a few months ago between a customer's house and barn:

 

[Webb Rousse]

This makes total sense and I really appreciate the insight. Any recommendations on cameras, video appliance/software and storage equipment for this application with regulatory requirements stated?

 

[bp2008]

I'm not sure this is feasible as you have it specified.

I count 12 cameras, though your numbering goes up to 22. Lets assume it is 12 cameras.

Now normally we'd be recommending 2MP video @ 15 FPS with a bit rate around 4 Mbps or higher. But that would be insane for storage requirements. 12 x 4 Mbps is 48 Mbps. 48 Mbps * 90 days is 46.65600 terabytes. Not reasonable for a "small farm". Okay, so your regulations require 720p @ 10 FPS minimum. Lets assume we achieve this by recording a 720p sub stream. If you push up the i-frame interval significantly you might get away with a 500 Kbps bit rate. 1 Mbps would be better. 1 Mbps * 12 cameras * 90 days is 11.66400 terabytes. Now that is much more reasonble for on-site storage as it would only require two 8TB+ hard drives. Of course the image quality is going to suck compared to what you could have without the asinine 90 days retention requirement. So you'll probably also want to record a better quality stream and just keep the video for less time.

As for 30 days offsite backup, there is no way satellite internet will handle that. Not for a single camera. The only way you're getting out any meaningful volume of video is with another dedicated wireless bridge linked to the offsite location, or a dedicated internet connection from a local ISP (which is very expensive).

Blue Iris doesn't do continuous offsite backup so that isn't really a great software option. I don't know what is.

 

[crw030]

I think your challenge is going to be the offsite 30-day storage, because if your cameras are streaming 40 MBps 24x7 won’t you need something close to that to keep up moving the data offsite?

I saw over on the ubiquiti forums there is an example of someone setting up a 90km link at 40MBps, I assume with great difficulty. Plus you would need good internet at the other end, and the right permits to put it up on a tower I guess.

You might have to copy the files to a portable hard drive and transfer them manually to address those requirements.


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