Enjoy

I'm sort of the "security guy" for my neighborhood... if there's a problem, they come find me.  For alarm system recommendations or monitoring, they email me... same for cameras.  I've used my camera footage to help out almost all of my neighbors, so they're big fans...  the "zone of protection" isn't just my house, but the areas I can see around nearby houses.  It's been useful for vandalism problems, traffic accidents, etc.  

My cameras are visible, but not obnoxiously so... but you can't miss them if you walk around my house.  They're almost all domes, and visible on the soffits.  

I can bring up all of my cameras on my cell phone, so if somebody asks me about cameras, I pull up my phone, hand it to them, and say "here you go... these streams are all live."  

My neighbors are good people, and we all look out for one anothers' kids, property, vehicles, etc.

ETA:  and I don't know of a good license-plate reading system on-the-cheap.  I'm still working on that solution myself.

A new contender has entered the ring against the FineVu and the SmartyHD...






This is the BlackVue DR500GW-HD... a cylindrical camera of a similar style to the SmartyHD.  It has a 2MP sensor, and records to a MicroSD card.  This one also has an interesting feature: Wifi.  You can reportedly connect to it via wifi to get video off the camera without unmounting it, or removing the memory card.  






It's larger than I thought it would be... about 4.5" long.  It's lightweight (didn't get a weight on it yet), and feels to be made of mostly plastic.  The grey mounting ring concerns me a bit... that may make it stand out on the inside of the windshield, and be more visible to thieves.  






Measured against the length of my hand.  This isn't a small camera... and here it is alongside the SmartyHD, which is considerably smaller, and lower-profile:









Comes with the usual goodies, including mounting tape (appears to be the red 3M tape), brackets to help guide the cable around the inside of the windshield, and a handy-dandy little USB MicroSD card reader... a nice bonus.






I plan to do some side-by-side testing against the FineVu, so stay tuned.  Should have something to report next week.  

Same ballpark... around $300

Not sure how long that would last in that enclosure... how's your climate?

The challenge with license plates is several-fold.  

1.  Pixel density

In order to read a license plate, you have to have pretty good pixel-density... usually 50-70 pixels-per-foot or more... like so:



For instance, this can be demonstrated in my current thread about Car Cams and Black-Box vehicle cameras.  These are 1080P HD cameras... 2.1 Megapixels in resolution, for a pixel count of 1920x1080.  However, they tend to be wide-angle, and thus spread their pixels out over a broad area.  

Think about a 120-degree-angle lens (common in car cams), with a 2.1MP resolution.  Using a little trigonometry, a car 15 meters away is going to be part of a scene that is 52 meters across (divide the 120-degree obtuse triangular field into two 30-60-90 right triangles, with a short side of 15 meters, and a hypotenuse of 30 meters... with a long side of 26 meters.  Double that long side to account for both triangles, and that gives you field-of-view 52 meters across, or 156 feet).  That gives you 1920 pixels to cover 156 feet... or about 13 pixels-per-foot.

In other words, forget about ID'ing a plate on a vehicle that far away.  Not happening.  

You MUST focus in on the plate/bumper area to get good plate shots... and a regular wide-angle camera (even at 1080P) isn't going to cut it.  You need a lens and a tighter shot to resolve the digits.  

2.  Shutter speed.

License plates are a moving target... and unless you have a straight-on shot of the plate, which can be tough to get,  you're going to have motion artifact.  This can be compensated for with a faster shutter speed, but the faster your shutter speed (and consequently, the shorter your exposure time), the more problems you have with low-light conditions.  With a fast enough shutter, anything but bright daylight can make your images too dark to use.... which brings us to problem #3

3.  Lighting.

License plates are surrounded by other light sources, some of them quite bright (eg. headlights).  Even tail-lights can present enough of a light-handling challenge as to obscure the digits on the plate.  What most specialized license plate cams do is utilize a tuned infrared source, and a long-pass filter.  The latter is an optically-selective bit of glass or plastic that covers the lens, blocks almost all visible light, but lets the longer-wavelengths through... allowing the IR and near-IR spectrum light to illuminate the plate.

Here is what I was alluding to in my previous post... this is a diagram of the trigonometric calculations, so you can better see what I mean by lens angle, and field-of-view.  I also included a to-scale diagram with the sides labeled.






The Trig calculator page is here, should you want to try some different values.  There are online lens calculators that do something similar, but this simplifies it somewhat for the sake of this particular example.

Good area coverage of the front-door and porch area.  You could clearly see the two perps and what they were up to.

It needed to be augmented with something a little closer to the door.  That would have given them a much better close-up, and hopefully some identifiable images (though it looks like at least the first guy wore a mask, and the second guy a broad-brimmed hat).  The perps' actions makes you wonder if they didn't know about the cameras.

And kick-resistant doors might have saved the homeowners life.

So here's some preliminary stuff on the FineVu Vs the BlackVue.  

(My vehicle has become quite the test-bed... here's what the passenger-side of my windshield looks like )






Here's a quick view of the interfaces from the respective cameras (I actually like the software on the SmartyHD the best of the three).  The Blackvue has this nifty time-line feature on the bottom of the screen, allowing you to jump ahead by minutes, hours, seconds, etc.  The file list can be tabbed to give you a google-map location.









Here is a poor video comparison of the FineVue (first 17 seconds), and the BlackVue (second 17 seconds).  I apologize for the quality... this was compressed from native format to MPEG4, to WMV11... so this doesn't begin to do justice to the original quality.  I had to do that because the native formats are literally hundreds of megabytes.  You will notice one thing when you compare the two halves of the video... the second half has MUCH more reflection from the inside of the windshield (and I think the video quality isn't quite as good anyway).  This again shows the benefit of the polarized filter.

Can't stress enough what a benefit that little filter gives... you're cheating yourself if you don't get one.

I've had a hard time beating the weather-resistance of the Mobotix stuff... they mount those cameras on mountaintops, fully-exposed to the weather.  The camera bodies are all composite, so they don't rust.  Putting one of those on a wireless bridge might be just the thing... you could power the whole thing from a solar setup.  It would pull maybe 12-15 watts.  Put some sealed AGM batteries and a charge controller on the pole, and you should be all set.  

Making it self-contained would save you having to run all that cable, waterproof all that conduit, etc.

Then this is dead easy.

I'd get an M14 series... (or a used M12 if you can find one).  They are weatherproof, have a built-in sunshade, usually come with 90-deg wide-angle lenses, and are dual imager (for day/night).  They take PoE for power, and I'd feed that data stream to a ubiquiti bridge.  There are a couple of Mobotix-on-wifi-bridge setups in this thread, powered exactly like yours would be.  

Try this page for an idea of what it might look like

This page gives you a close-up of how the wiring is done.  


That's a D-12 dome... whereas you'd want the dual-imager M-12... but everything else would be exactly the same.

It's a basic plastic enclosure (get the plastic one... the metal ones will block your wifi)... and the power brick is meant to go into an LCD sign.  Meanwell makes the power-supply... and there are a bunch of them out there... search Amazon for the PSU.  A 20-30W should do you just fine... and they are also weatherproof in case any water gets into the enclosure.

Here are links to the enclosure, the PoE power convertor, and the Ubiquiti bridge (wireless b/g... more than fast enough for a single camera).  These links are all to Streakwave, but you could probably get them from any online wireless dealer.  FAB-corp, flytec, solidsignal... wherever you like to shop.  

Link

Link

Link

More info on the car-cams (cross-posted in the Safes and Home Security Forum):

Here is a minute-long video comparing the four cameras I currently have mounted.

Each section is labeled.

This is the same section of road, at roughly the same time-frame (the analog section is shortly before the three digital/HD sections... I didn't get them synced up exactly right, as denoted by that last orange barrel you see in the right side of the screen).  

The first analog section is just for comparison... the digital car-cams provide much better pictures.

For picture quality, I have to give it to the FineVue, especially with the polarized filter... but its video format (if worked on outside their viewer software... which doesn't export video) is the hardest to work with... it's literally painful.  The FineVue is also the smallest of the lot, but part of that is because it lacks an internal GPS receiver/chip, which the other digital cameras build into their units.  The FineVue GPS receiver is available as an external $50 option, and it requires additional wiring.    

The SmartHD has the best viewer software IMO... very user-friendly.  The video quality is decent, and it takes a standard-sized SD card.  You can also get extra mounting rings, in case you want to move it from vehicle to vehicle (the ring stays mounted to the windshield).  

The Blackvue has a bunch of nifty features, including a wireless client that keeps you from having to remove the memory card.... except you can't view recorded video through the wireless client... only live.    It also has a video-brightness problem that has been documented on some of their forums (and you can see at the end of this video).  Note how the video suddenly brightens up?  And the lighting conditions outside (bright sunlight) didn't change?  It's a known glitch, and I don't know if they have a fix out there for it yet.  It's also the largest of these cameras, and not very low-profile.  I could also do without the multitude of LEDs.

No...  you do need the custom cable.  The Ubiquiti Nano runs off of Passive PoE... which is about 12VDC.  Standard PoE is 48VDC.  What you basically are doing is powering the Nano bridge and the regular 48VDC PoE convertor brick from the same 12V power supply.  

That PoE convertor brick takes in 12VDC through those green screw-down terminals on the left side, and outputs data+48VDC out the right-hand side:



Regular 10/100 ethernet only uses four of the wires in a standard 8-wire ethernet cable... the others are extra... so the Ubiquiti Nano uses those wires to feed power to the Nano bridge.  All you're doing is grabbing 12VDC from those same green screw-down terminals on the left-hand side and feeding it through the four extra wires you split off from the regular cable.  

Like so:





ETA:  Both the Nano and the PoE convertor brick are powered in this video... note the green power lights on both devices?

you're reading it right...  but let me show you why my way is simpler

ETA:  stand by... eating

ETA2:  OK...

When they say "power supply," Ubiquiti supplies one of these jobbies in the box with the Loco or Nano station.  It's a basic power brick... and you COULD put that in your box, and connect the "LAN" port to the PoE convertor brick, and the "POE" port to the Nano/Locostation... but that requires you to put a 120VAC outlet inside your box, and requires extra wiring, and represents an additional point of failure.  





Or you can run the whole thing off the single 12VDC power supply, simply by hacking a cable.  Here's one I recently made... it's for a covert camera installation.  It's all mounted to a long/narrow piece of plywood, because there's a tight, hollow area that it has to fit inside (the camera is mounted elsewhere).   The Ubiquiti wireless hardware in this case is a PicoStation, set up in bridge mode, and it sends the camera stream back to an Access Point.  Nobody will ever know it's there.






I powered it all off that long 12VPSU on the left side of the board.   Here's a close-up of the PoE convertor brick... identical wiring connections shown in the box I linked up-thread.  The camera will plug into the top of that PoE injector.

Tycon power, I think

Yep... it's a Tycon Power polycarbonate enclosure.

Link to PDF

Here's an ugly shootout, caught on the drug dealer's security cameras.  One officer was wounded (three rounds in the abdomen), while the perp was DRT with a round-to-the-head.  He also took some other hits... you can see from the large amount of blood on his shirt as he's hiding behind the tree.  He was not a big or particularly imposing guy, but he managed to absorb several hits.  Even though he was barely standing, he still managed to get rounds on the officers.

The youtube version is posted below... the unedited video (complete with visible pink-mist headshot) is on liveleak here

I posted this to point out the camera placement.  One to the left of his door to cover the entry and one end of the circular driveway (note the outer steel security door), and one to cover the other entrance to the driveway.  They are clearly analog cameras.

Angles are good too... no visible sky to screw up the light-balance, or create dynamic-range problems for the shaded area under that big tree.

*nodding*

I know that feeling well.  

What kind of frame-rate do you need?

Here is a method to FTP an image every 30 seconds or so.

I stopped writing web code back in the static HTML days.  You're probably going to have to get with your web-page geek and see if he can embed it.

It shouldn't be that difficult... an iframe could probably do it.

I don't have too much experience with the Bosch stuff... but I have seen it used (last time I flew out of Atlanta Hartsfield, the entire facility was bristling with Bosch cameras).

Maybe some of the other guys can weigh in.

Is that you at the desk in the plaid?  

Quality looks pretty good.  Which camera did you use?

ETA:  here's a screen-grab, straight off of firefox and unretouched:

Good choice.

It will require light to give you a useful image at night.