Look for IT over here

My last post I gave a quick overview of my hardware (PC, camera and capture card) that I was using on my surveillance system. This post I will explain what OS and software I use.

My operating system of choice for this ‘project’ was SUSE. The initial reason was that learning Linux is (in my opinion) a bit easier because if I got stuck with the command line, I could always fall back (ie cheat) with the GUI which I found quite comfortable to use. Other Linux distros I had difficulty using. I am currently using SUSE 10.2 - a vast improvement over 9.3 which I previously used on another one of my boxes at home.

Next was the software. As I said in my previous post, I had troubles getting windows drivers to work, and when that was sorted out, I could not find any suitable software (for my needs anyway). The PICO2000 software looks like what I was after, but as I wanted to use/learn Linux, I found a great product called Zoneminder.

First looks at Zoneminder indicated that that it was a popular (and free) piece of software, great support and very customizable for your own needs. What the hell - I’ll give it a go.

I first installed Zoneminder a couple of years back all via the CLI - not a problem if you are conversant with the file structure of Linux, TAR etc. But it was a steep learning curve for me. I worked it all out in the end, but an easier way (if you’re using SUSE) is to install the RPM using YaST. Here is the link for the SUSE RPMs. The beauty of doing it via YaST is that it can resolve your dependancies for you, so all the appropriate packages can be installed in one hit.

Anyway, I installed it without too many hassles. Next post I will show you some of the features and my setup.

Want to set up a home surveillance system at home while having a bit of fun?

Here’s a bit of a guide of what to do - or more so what I did and how.

Originally this started as a bit of a project in my spare time, but after some teenage idiots decided to throw rocks and eggs at our place one night, it became more of a security thing as I wanted to catch those bastards!

Anyway, back to the good stuff. Not having a big budget, I decided to do a bit of reading and find how much a cheap setup would cost me.

First of all I needed a dedicated PC that I could ‘break’ and it wouldn’t be a drama. Easy - I have a few lying around here and decided to go with a IBM Net Vista PIII 850 with 256M RAM and a 40 Gig hard drive. It’s nothing flash but a good stable PC. I also needed a video capture (DVR) card and a camera. That’s where Ebay came in.

Ebay have these cheap 4 port capture (DVR) cards that you can pick up for about $10. There are a few different types, and if you pay a few more dollars you can get one that processes more frames per second (fps) at a time.

One thing I did read quite often is that with these cheap cards, if you think you can run 4 cameras at real time, then you are dreaming. One or two cameras is bit more realistic. Don’t forget this was more of a project.

The card I got was called a Pico 2000 DVR card
(Please take note of comment #1 at the end of the post),
and looks like this:

The card comes with Windows drivers, and I can tell you now that getting this card to work under Windows (XP) was a real pain (and didn’t work with the drivers supplied) . I will do a separate article about using this under Windows as it deserves its own post. I ended up using Linux for my project.

Now, the camera - again from Ebay. Search for ‘Nightvision camera’ and see how many results come up. You have a few options here as well. Whether you want a wired or wireless camera, color or B/W, and of course what physical size.

Here’s what I chose (but in a cream case). It’s a wired color camera, with 18 LEDs that does enable a bit of seeing in the dark:

To connect the camera to the DVR card, I will use coax cable and terminate RCA plugs at either end. Not too hard to do if you’re handy with a soldering iron. Note: As you can see there are two connectors for the camera. One is for the video signal, and the other is for power, which comes from a standard plug pack transformer.

Next article, I will get into the OS and software that i used.

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