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Over the last couple of weeks about 10 houses in my neighbourhood have
been burgled. While I have a burglar alarm, I'm curious about setting
up a home cctv setup.
ie a web cam which watches the path to the front door and takes photos
when someone approaches on the pretext that a burglar would want to
check no one is home prior to entering and the safest way of doing
this would be to knock on the door and see if anyone was home.

I have an ASDL account and a modern pc. Does anyone have experience in
getting such a setup running?

What program did they use?
What sort of web cam?
What about lengths of cable as the front door is about 15m from the
pc?


Thanks

Damos


"It's a foreboding I have - maybe ill placed - of my children's generation
or my grandchildren's generation ... when clutching our horoscopes, our
critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what
right and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into
superstition and darkness."

Carl Sagan.

"Damos" <> wrote in message
news:...
> Over the last couple of weeks about 10 houses in my neighbourhood have
> been burgled. While I have a burglar alarm, I'm curious about setting
> up a home cctv setup.
> ie a web cam which watches the path to the front door and takes photos
> when someone approaches on the pretext that a burglar would want to
> check no one is home prior to entering and the safest way of doing
> this would be to knock on the door and see if anyone was home.
>
> I have an ASDL account and a modern pc. Does anyone have experience in
> getting such a setup running?
>
> What program did they use?
> What sort of web cam?
> What about lengths of cable as the front door is about 15m from the
> pc?
>
>
> Thanks
>
> Damos
>

There are a whole bunch of suitable products under the brand name Swann
http://www.swann.com.au/
They are widely distributed.
http://dse.resultspage.com/search.ph...&site=&w=swann

Damos said the following on 13/06/2004 13:28:
> Over the last couple of weeks about 10 houses in my neighbourhood have
> been burgled. While I have a burglar alarm, I'm curious about setting
> up a home cctv setup.
> ie a web cam which watches the path to the front door and takes photos
> when someone approaches on the pretext that a burglar would want to
> check no one is home prior to entering and the safest way of doing
> this would be to knock on the door and see if anyone was home.
>
> I have an ASDL account and a modern pc. Does anyone have experience in
> getting such a setup running?
>
> What program did they use?
> What sort of web cam?
> What about lengths of cable as the front door is about 15m from the
> pc?
>
I did this in my place at Pakuranga a while back. I used a freeware web
cam prog off the internet that compared the current to the last image
and recorded the image if there was a variation in the two. The extent
of the variation was adjustable and I managed to get it accurate enough
that it actually snapped everyone walking past the front gate.
The quality of the image depended on the camera and the cheapo pen cam I
used initially was probably of no use for ID, but the good mega pixel i
used when I didnt have it with me was great. The time frame for
comparison was set so that if a person came in the gate to go to the
front door I got two shots of them and conversely two of them leaving.
The software was able to upload the image via ftp to a java enabled web
page which meant I could view it on the net from anywhere and it could
also send an advice email when a new image was taken.

Really neat but became a bore after a while.

Damos said the following on 13/06/2004 13:28:

> Over the last couple of weeks about 10 houses in my neighbourhood have
> been burgled. While I have a burglar alarm, I'm curious about setting
> up a home cctv setup.
> ie a web cam which watches the path to the front door and takes photos
> when someone approaches on the pretext that a burglar would want to
> check no one is home prior to entering and the safest way of doing
> this would be to knock on the door and see if anyone was home.
>
> I have an ASDL account and a modern pc. Does anyone have experience in
> getting such a setup running?
>
> What program did they use?
> What sort of web cam?
> What about lengths of cable as the front door is about 15m from the
> pc?
> Now if I was going to do this again I would use one of the IR equiped
cameras with a wide angle lense and a wireless transmitter, they can be
bought for a reasonable price these days. Being wireless gets round the
USB cable length problem I had with my old setup and the IR gives quite
good night operation. I will try to find the software I used and post
the name