Sidewalk Cameras on two monitors

[James Sentman]

It sounds like possibly a raspberry pi solution might be what you want. A raspberry pi can be powered with POE, I have some fairly reliable security camera software you can use to both get it into XTension via video pitcher as well as view it on a connected monitor right inside the door. You can use any small HDMI monitor to do the viewing from the Pi. You mount the camera outside and run the small HDMI cable through the wall and to the screen. If you also want to POE power the monitor you may have to run a separate POE line as I’m not sure how much power they can supply beyond what the Pi needs. Most adaptors I’ve seen only put out about an amp or so but there may be others that put out more.

The monitor could be dedicated to just displaying the camera feed from the Pi. It doesn’t have to be a touch screen or directly attached. Any small HDMI TV or monitor would work and some of those are fairly cheap as long as you don’t care too much for vibrant 4k video quality :) Certainly good enough to display the Pi camera. The best Pi cameras are capable of better than 1080p resolution at a full 30fps and are 8mp sensors and can even be IR with illuminators.

The biggest challenge for such a thing will be building a weather proof enclosure for it outside. They make long ribbon cable connectors for the cameras so if you’d rather keep the Pi inside then you could just mount the camera outside as long as it was within a meter or 2 of the final mounting place. Since that is a ribbon cable 3/4 of an inch wide or so it would even be glued to the wall inside or out and painted to match and it would almost entirely disappear. There are clear fronted water proof boxes that would work to hold the camera but some fiddling around to get everything mounted and attached would be necessary on your  part ;) Caulking up the cable entries or using proper cable glands and such or the inside would fog up. I’ve had one in my garage without a case at all for quite some time now and it hasn’t gotten upset at the humidity or other things. For an outdoor system that you want IR on I would recommend one of the cameras with an IR Cut mechanism built in. Those are usually available for between 20 and 30 bucks depending on where you order them from. So far I have not seen a version 2 camera with the 8mp sensor and an IR cut device. All the ones I’ve found are still the older gen 1 cameras with only a 5mp sensor. This still can do better than 1080p resolution though and they work just fine though with slightly less definition since they are a smaller device.

All that you can do with a raspberry pi zero and if you’re going to use a POE device you don’t even need the pi zero w, just the pi zero and either an ethernet POE “hat” or a separate USB/Ethernet adaptor and POE splitter would work fine. If you’d rather have a little faster pi to run up there the pi3B+ or the newer Pi4’s are terrific and also have POE “hats” or adaptors that are available. It will end up being slightly more expensive than the cheapest of commercial recorders and you’ll have to build the external mount, but it can definitely do the live feed to the external monitor which I’m not sure any commercially available devices can do, at least not without getting a screen that is also some kind of viewer or something which would add considerably to the cost.


> On Feb 23, 2020, at 10:58 AM, Jerry — MacSolutions <jerry at stlmacguy.com> wrote:
> 
> I appreciate the feedback.  I’m fairly certain that I’d like to have tow separate dedicated monitors since I don’t think that I can expect my wife and daughter to go find an iPad to view their camera on, when the dogs tell them that they need to go out.  The space above the front door is exactly 12 inches from the ceiling t the wood trim on the door.  My goal is to mount the small monitors there for each direction the cameras are pointed.
> 
> The other option is to view the video on the monitor, attached to the XTension machine.  I guess that if I fed the video into XTension, I could view those on that same screen.  I wonder if there’s a way to hide the frames around the video, to make a cleaner image?  The monitor is a touch screen and I don’t want anyone messing with that portion of the display.
> 
> Can you tell me to cost of what you own now?
> 

Thanks,
 James


James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org		http://MacHomeAutomation.com




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