4 for 1 sale

[James Sentman]

On Mar 30, 2005, at 8:46 AM, John Brumleve wrote:

> Hi Michael,
>
> If I wanted to start playing with webcams and views in XTension, are
> any of the cameras offered by X-10 worth dealing with?  Wireless and
> panning is not needed.

I definitely prefer the wired ones if you don't mind running wires. 
Picture quality is better, and they don't broadcast whats going on in 
your house to people around the neighborhood. There have been several 
articles about people driving down the street with an X10 receiver and 
a mini tv set and watching all the nany cams in the neighborhood... I 
should try that around here :)

>
> Color: definitely.  Night Vision: may be nice.  Is night vision capable
> of color?
>

Not from X10. the low light ones are B&W. They are definitely not 
"night vision" and I wouldn't necessarily call them "low light" but 
they definitely work in "less light" than the color cameras. but they 
are inexpensive and easy to work with and if you run cat5 to them 
instead of using the built in cables you can always replace them with a 
more expensive camera at some later date, and you may decide that you 
can live with them as they aren't "bad" just not as good as you can get 
for a lot more money. I'd definitely start out with the X10 cams and 
see how they work.

> I can't recall the consensus on the value of the X-10 cameras.
> Additionally, are there others that I should consider instead?
>

I uploaded some of the time lapse that I have done with my "low light" 
one on my deck. 2 movies, one from last summer, and another from a 
couple of days ago:

http://www.sentman.com/movies/decklapse.mov

and

http://www.sentman.com/movies/grillmeister.mov

the second one has some frames at the end that are after dark. In the 
dark they record nothing, but once XTension turns on the deck lights 
they can see fairly well, at least good enough to see someone there if 
not good enough to recognize them. It's possible that I could get 
better resolution with a better video capture device, this one is the 
belkin video bus and the output is the fairly small video that you see 
there.

i capture a frame every second for a while after a motion hit and save 
them off to a directory and then at night I run a script to link them 
all together into a movie. it would be nice to have a "last hour" type 
movie created live all the time, but I haven't gotten that working yet 
;)

> Mostly, I would like to have cameras placed outside the house, looking
> back at the house, so I would put them in the weather, under some 
> domes.
>  I'd prefer to bury wires to them: is cable length a problem?
>

That camera in those movies is running through more than 100' of Cat5 
cable before coming into my desk and the digitizer. It does 
occasionally pick up a line or some other interference, but overall I 
don't think that it's going to be a problem unless it's a really long 
cable. they make outdoor cat5 I think dont they? I'd pay a little money 
for good cable to run as this is not a job you want to do more than 
once ;) If you do get too much signal loss, you can get baluns and 
other things to add to the cable to get it through, but that will add 
$100 or so to the cost of the project as you need one for both ends and 
they aren't cheap.

> BTW: I found some clear plastic domes: At a Christmas decoration store.
>  They are intended to be clipped back-to-back to make those huge
> Christmas tree ornaments that are often in public displays.  Most of
> what they sold were in colors, but they also had clear ones that only
> cost about $8 for 10" diameter.  Handy.
>

What a neat idea... I'll be keeping my eyes open this coming post 
christmas sale period :D

-James