Do it yourself CCTV
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I have always wanted to be able to peek around my house while I am out and about, specially when I am on holiday for a week or two. This might have come from sheer paranoia, or it is just the kind of technology I always wanted to possess. I have done researches in the past, and have always been put off by the complexity and cost of the home security kits which are commercially available. The other hassle is the trailing wires everywhere, and the problem of bringing power to the strategically mounted sensors. Well, I had another go at this recently, and was surprised to see technology has moved on to the point where this has become a painless experience.
I remember the last attempt I had at this, I bought some X10 enabled wireless cameras, which send video over the 2.4GHz band to a remote receiver. The receiver then has SCART output, which can be plugged into a video capture card in your computer. This setup was not too bad, but it was still a pain in that you have to have some software on you PC to read from the capture card and digitises the video into file streams. Also, the motion detector in the camera unit simply issued X10 commands, which can not be captured by your PC for triggering, unless you have an X10 interface too. Nah, too painful.
The new setup consists of a all in one IP wireless camera from Panasonic. An IP camera is different from those described above in that it has a built-in video capture capability and web server. In fact, all you need to do is connect it to your local area network (LAN) using either the RJ45, or 802.11b wireless connection. The wireless connection is a bit more involved, as you have to hook up the camera using the wired connection first, configure it with the correct WEP key etc. so that it is welcome to the family when attempting to connect wirelessly for the first time. I got my  from EBuyer , which seems to be the cheapest deal around. You can either go for a BL-C1 (wired connection only), or a BL-C20 (wired and wireless), with the latter costing roughly 60% more than the former. This camera is a true plug and play device, so if you have uPnP enabled on your PC, it will automatically find it and make it available in Windows Explorer. Naturally, if you have manually configured your LAN, you might want to tweak the settings on the camera a bit so it operates on the same subnet as the rest of your network.
The configuration screens are pretty straight forward for these embedded web servers, and you should be able to find your way around without having to consult the manual (which is pretty useless, in my opinion). The only gotcha is you have to first run the software from the accompanying CD in order to set the user name and password before you can access the configuration screens. If there is a default username/password, it is certainly not mentioned anywhere in the manual, so you have no choice but running up the software at least once (otherwise the whole thing could have been done from a web browser without the need to load anything on to your PC). A minor annoyance.
The camera has built in motion detection, with pre and post trigger capture (meaning you can see the face of the kid throwing the brick through your window as soon as he approaches your front lawn, not just the back of him as he is running away  ). You can fine tune the number of images you want to capture for each detection, and the number of images sent to your mobile when it happens too, in case you are abroad and do not want to pay the expensive roaming rates. It will send these images to an FTP server anywhere on the internet, and also sends email notifications to you, your mate around the corner, and even the local law enforcement agency of your choice). However, I must stress here is the camera's motion detector is rather sensitive, so even with tweaking, chances are you will be receiving lots of mails about the house opposite's pussycat walking across their lawn. The image quality is certainly good enough to use as evidence, or to feature on Crimewatch, although it is not as good at night time because there is no Infrared sensor (which is potentially my next project  ). The live image streamed out by the camera can be viewed from anywhere in the world once the camera's web server is port forwarded to your ADSL/Broadband router. Panasonic has even included details of a free dynamic DNS service which can map your camera into an accessible web address, so you do not have memorise the IP address of your router when you go on holiday.
The camera has digital zoom capability up to 10 times. Motion triggers are configurable to the time of day and the days of the week. Wired and wireless mode are switchable with a switch on the side of the camera. I had it on wireless for the first few days, but got fed up with the unreliability. When these Wifi equipment vendors rate their access points as 11Mbps or 54 Mbps etc., what they do not tell you is that this figure is maximum throughput, not the sustained throughput. This means that the camera will work beautifully once the route is established between itself and your web browser, but for the majority of the time, the web browser will time out (FTP of images from the camera to the server does not suffer from this connectivity problem, surprisingly). This is more noticeable once you have a couple of solid doors between the camera and the Wifi access point. I gave up on the wireless mode, and went for a different solution.
The camera is mounted at the front of the house where it is a challenge to feed it either power or network connection (hence the wireless solution in the first place). I happened to stumble on an alternative technology by chance while looking up something unrelated in Google, namely the Devolo dLAN adapters , which allow you to build you network connections on top of the existing mains power. I must say this technology rocks ! It is way better than 802.11. You essentially need to get a couple of adapters, one to connect to your LAN router, the other to connect to the camera. Both adapters plug directly into the mains socket, and will shift the bits at 14Mbps, more than enough for the camera's images. The manual which comes with the adapters says you achieve better throughput if you plug the adapters directly into the wall rather than a multiway socket, but the chances of finding a free wall socket in my household are less than picking all six numbers correctly in Saturday's lotto draw. Anyway, my adapters are as far apart geographically as they can be, and are both plugged into multiway sockets, and yet connectivity is perfect and reliability is a thousand times better than WiFi.
The last thing you need is a 5m RJ45 M-M network patch cable to connect the Devolo adapter to the camera through the wall. I got mine in the local Comet store for £6.99, only to find out the same thing costs 99p at EBuyer  . All in all, the whole kit costs under £200. I like this solution better than the ready made, off the shelf ones because it has an element of excitement when everything is up and running. I also like the output quality and the ease and versatility of configuration of the camera itself.
One footnote, I am not affiliated with EBuyer or Overclocker, I am simply a happy customer with both of these vendors.
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