Any recommendations for network camera w/ battery operation.

sensored. I only would want the camera to deliver pictures to an FTP site or email only when motion is detected. I also would like to not have to find a power source where I want to locate the camera, so an extended battery life would be nice. Anyone have any recommendations? The battery powered feature seems to be the difficult option to find.

The Axis 210 does all that and supports 802.3af Power Over Ethernet, so you don't have to supply power at the camera location. The motion detection can be a little fiddly, but there's an awful lot of flexibility in the camera.

IMHO, the power requirements of a network camera are going to rule out battery power, unless you are talking about golf-cart batteries, and then swapping/charging them is going to be difficult...

"Sam Santiago" hath wroth:

sensored. I only would want the camera to deliver pictures to an FTP site or email only when motion is detected. I also would like to not have to find a power source where I want to locate the camera, so an extended battery life would be nice. Anyone have any recommendations? The battery powered feature seems to be the difficult option to find.

You didn't mention whether the pictures were to be returned via wireless or a wired connection. If wired, you could use PoE (power over ethernet) to power the device. Toshiba IK-WB02A for about $550 should work. It will run on 24VAC, 12VDC or PoE.

If you're going wireless, then there's a problem with power. 802.11 wireless does not like to be constantly connected and disconnected (or powered up and down) every time the camera wants to play FTP. The power consumption is also rather high as camera, 802.11 client, and processor will each burn about 1 to 4 watts. If the computer section is a common SBC (single board computer) power dissipation will be much higher. That will kill a battery pack rather rapidly. If there's IR illumination, even faster. It can be done, but you'll be replaceing batteries quite often. Solar charging will help. In addition, if you want motion detection, you can't really cycle the power on and off to the camera (to save the batteries) as you're likely to miss something move.

You could possibly throw together something using an X10 type RF video link and use an AC powered computah to deal with the motion detection and uploads. Any of the covert video or spy shop cameras can do that with NTSC video. The computer would then be a dedicated "video server" such as:

In fact, the Axis 210 draws around 5W, or something like 4KWHR/month,

300+ amp hours at 12V, so even golf cart batteries would have to be charged twice a month (or have engineered a $400-ish solar power system).

Thanks,

Sam

I got a wireless webcam on ebay. Most accept 5v input. Then you need something like

to power it. Not sure how long it would last though.

=_NextPart_000_000A_01C60C10.07E0C960

I assume you are talking about a "wireless" network cam. It would be pretty simple to make a battery pack to power the cam. The batterys might need to be a large size to power the cam for any length of time. You would probably need to use an IR motion detector to turn the cam on when motion is detected, otherwise you would run the batterys down for no good reason.

Have you noticed how some people are careless regarding the security of their IP cameras. Try a google search for:- intitle:"Live View / - AXIS" intitle:liveapplet

see how many you get to control.

Rob

William P.N. Smith hath wroth:

Ummmm...

5watts * 24 hrs/day * 30 days/month = 3000 watt-hrs/month At $0.15/kw-hr, that would cost over $5.40 /year in electricity to operate.

A common Type 27 gel battery can deliver about 100A-HR at 12V.

'll assume a 100% efficient switching regulator (because I'm lazy) down to whatever the Axis 210 wants for voltage. Therefore, this battery is good for: 100 A-hrs * 12V = 1200 watt-hrs However, you can only safely discharge this battery down to about 75% of capacity before damaging the battery. That's 300 watt-hrs which yields: 300 watt-hrs / 5 watts = 60 hrs. The battery will need to be recharged every 2.5 days. Yech.

I threw together an Excel spreadsheet for calculating solar powered commercial and ham VHF/UHF repeaters.

can easily be adapted to lower power wireless devices. Comments and improvements are always welcome.

I'm not sure what the security issue is as the links would have to be in publically availabe web pages for the google bot to pick them up.

Thank you all for your suggestions. I appreciate the help.

Home Depot had just what you want for $99 last week.