Driveway alert camera

[welbo97]

Hello all. Glad I found you. Looks like a good source of info.
I'd like to set up a camera on a driveway for the purpose of sending images of vehicles that are coming up or going down the driveway to mobile devices. I have a Home Assistant instance running at this location and can handle the alert of the mjpeg image image already. I can use an RTSP stream if necessary but it doesn't work as well.
The driveway is about 1/4 mile long. There is a creek about 400 yards from the house with lots of trees. At the creek there is a driveway alerting system that transmits a wireless signal to a receiver in the house to play a tone. My first thought was to put a camera on the house with a significant zoom lens focused on the creek alert sensor. Then when it fires, capture an image and send it to the mobile devices through Home Assistant. I also considered that the motion detection in the camera would be much better at actually capturing the vehicle instead of before or after the vehicle passed.
There is no power at the creek but I could set up a solar panel and battery to power the camera and some motion lights for illumination at night. That would mean a wireless link over that distance too. I'm not a big fan of wireless, which is why I was leaning toward a camera on the house (POE).

I'm a big believer in not reinventing the wheel. I suspect many of you have been through this already. If you care to share your experiences and opinions, I'll gladly absorb them in order to keep from making a bunch of the same mistakes.

 

[Old Larry]

Hello all. Glad I found you. Looks like a good source of info.
I'd like to set up a camera on a driveway for the purpose of sending images of vehicles that are coming up or going down the driveway to mobile devices. I have a Home Assistant instance running at this location and can handle the alert of the mjpeg image image already. I can use an RTSP stream if necessary but it doesn't work as well.
The driveway is about 1/4 mile long. There is a creek about 400 yards from the house with lots of trees. At the creek there is a driveway alerting system that transmits a wireless signal to a receiver in the house to play a tone. My first thought was to put a camera on the house with a significant zoom lens focused on the creek alert sensor. Then when it fires, capture an image and send it to the mobile devices through Home Assistant. I also considered that the motion detection in the camera would be much better at actually capturing the vehicle instead of before or after the vehicle passed.
There is no power at the creek but I could set up a solar panel and battery to power the camera and some motion lights for illumination at night. That would mean a wireless link over that distance too. I'm not a big fan of wireless, which is why I was leaning toward a camera on the house (POE).

I'm a big believer in not reinventing the wheel. I suspect many of you have been through this already. If you care to share your experiences and opinions, I'll gladly absorb them in order to keep from making a bunch of the same mistakes.

I have a very similar setup. I have a Dakota Alert magnetic vehicle probe buried in the driveway, about 1/8 mile from the house. I have this device input as an alarm to my NVR. The NVR triggers one camera at the house (Dahau SD49225T-HN) to reposition and focus on the driveway about 300' from the house. The NVR also sends a email to my cell phone. I make sure there is a pot hole or two where the camera is focused, which slows the vehicles down, so I can get a good image of the car and plate. If I'm at home and the driveway alarm chimes, I can look out and see who is coming, if I'm away and get a email, I can pull up my cameras and see what is going on. For vehicle and plate identification at night you would probably need a separate camera. It takes a few seconds for the camera to reposition and focus thus taking a single image to capture the vehicle would take some practice. I have found this system to be very reliable with very few misses and only false alarms during thunderstorms.

 

[welbo97]

Good to know the concept works. Do you find you set the zoom to 25x on your camera? How is the quality? You are able to read license plates with that?
My setup would be a good bit further away at around 400 yards. I intend to set up a motion light that is battery powered with solar. If that is too much distance to capture useful pictures, setting up a camera with a wireless link might be the better option. If it is only going to be capturing short videos or still images on motion activation, it shouldn't use a lot of power. I just do not have a lot of confidence in the stability of a wireless link and would prefer to have the camera wired in at the house if zoom works well enough. I don't NEED to be able to read license plates, although I have some software that would allow some neat automations with license plate recognition. Just trying to glean the feasibility for any of these methods.
Thanks for the response. Sounds like a neat system that does just what you want it to.

 

[biggen]

Hello all. Glad I found you. Looks like a good source of info.
I'd like to set up a camera on a driveway for the purpose of sending images of vehicles that are coming up or going down the driveway to mobile devices. I have a Home Assistant instance running at this location and can handle the alert of the mjpeg image image already. I can use an RTSP stream if necessary but it doesn't work as well.
The driveway is about 1/4 mile long. There is a creek about 400 yards from the house with lots of trees. At the creek there is a driveway alerting system that transmits a wireless signal to a receiver in the house to play a tone. My first thought was to put a camera on the house with a significant zoom lens focused on the creek alert sensor. Then when it fires, capture an image and send it to the mobile devices through Home Assistant. I also considered that the motion detection in the camera would be much better at actually capturing the vehicle instead of before or after the vehicle passed.
There is no power at the creek but I could set up a solar panel and battery to power the camera and some motion lights for illumination at night. That would mean a wireless link over that distance too. I'm not a big fan of wireless, which is why I was leaning toward a camera on the house (POE).

I'm a big believer in not reinventing the wheel. I suspect many of you have been through this already. If you care to share your experiences and opinions, I'll gladly absorb them in order to keep from making a bunch of the same mistakes.

I use Frigate to send a notification to my phone when someone sets foot on my driveway. Notifications are sent via HA from Frigate through MQTT. It uses a Google Coral device so its dead accurate for the AI portion of object detection. Takes some know how and some trial/error to setup, but I love it now that I have it running. For your case you could have a camera setup that looks down the driveway and feed that RTSP stream to Frigate. Then Frigate would look for a car and trigger a notification to be sent via HA.

I use a 5241-Z12 for my LPR camera. It has a max focal length of 60mm. You can read plates with it to ~175' or so. But if you don't care about plates and just want an early notification a car is coming down the driveway, it would be good for that purpose fully zoomed in. Is the driveway a straight shot dead on from your house so they are driving directly at you? Or is it angled so you will get a side shot of the car as they drive in?

 

[welbo97]

I love tinkering with HA so I'll have to look up Frigate and read about it and Coral. If the camera is mounted on the house, it would be at about a 20 degree angle, not looking down the driveway road. It is just a single road with only one place to go though. I want the early alert with a pic of the vehicle. The end user can usually identify who/if someone on that private road belongs there. Then one of the other house cams monitoring the driveway next to the house could feed the plate pics into AI for further ID without much hassle.
I would think a 60mm lens would be able to make a pretty good picture of a vehicle 400 yards away. Does that camera's current software have vehicle and person detection built in? If I can do it in the camera, that is preferable to using nvr software.
This location has pretty poor internet service as well. I'm doing my best to avoid cloud services, especially video. Deepstack has been doing a very nice job for me on another test setup.

 

[biggen]

I love tinkering with HA so I'll have to look up Frigate and read about it and Coral. If the camera is mounted on the house, it would be at about a 20 degree angle, not looking down the driveway road. It is just a single road with only one place to go though. I want the early alert with a pic of the vehicle. The end user can usually identify who/if someone on that private road belongs there. Then one of the other house cams monitoring the driveway next to the house could feed the plate pics into AI for further ID without much hassle.
I would think a 60mm lens would be able to make a pretty good picture of a vehicle 400 yards away. Does that camera's current software have vehicle and person detection built in? If I can do it in the camera, that is preferable to using nvr software.
This location has pretty poor internet service as well. I'm doing my best to avoid cloud services, especially video. Deepstack has been doing a very nice job for me on another test setup.

I'm not sure what capabilities the camera has as far as AI since I don't use it for that. I treat them as dumb video streams and do all my AI/motion stuff with other programs externally. You generally have to pair Dahua cameras with Dahua NVRs anyway to take advantage of any built-in onboard AI that the camera/NVR have. I'm also not impressed with their AI abilities from what I have seen when running them onboard. There are better solutions (Deepstack, Frigate, OpenALPR, etc..)

Frigate is all run locally. No cloud.

 

[Old Larry]

Good to know the concept works. Do you find you set the zoom to 25x on your camera? How is the quality? You are able to read license plates with that?
My setup would be a good bit further away at around 400 yards. I intend to set up a motion light that is battery powered with solar. If that is too much distance to capture useful pictures, setting up a camera with a wireless link might be the better option. If it is only going to be capturing short videos or still images on motion activation, it shouldn't use a lot of power. I just do not have a lot of confidence in the stability of a wireless link and would prefer to have the camera wired in at the house if zoom works well enough. I don't NEED to be able to read license plates, although I have some software that would allow some neat automations with license plate recognition. Just trying to glean the feasibility for any of these methods.
Thanks for the response. Sounds like a neat system that does just what you want it to.

This is a picture of a mail truck leaving after delivering a package taken at about 300 ft. from the camera. Zoom would be less than half. With the number of deer around my house, using motion detection would result in a large number of false positives.

 

[samplenhold]

So is it imperative to get the video of the vehicle when it is at the creek and 400 yards away? You already have it being announced by your alert system. If you run ethernet cable out to a pole at 100 yards and place the cam there, say a 5241 Z12, you could get a good plate shot at 175-200 feet away from the cam. Others here have gotten good results at that distance. That would be about 230 yards from the creek.

You could even push the distance of the ethernet to about 200 yards or more. Several post here that discuss pushing the ethernet distance or using a POE+ extender to go even further. The 100M theoretical limit for ethernet is for a 1Gig throughput. But cams never need more than 100Meg which can be done for quite a distance beyond 100M.

Additionally, you could run 120VAC out as far as you need, install a POE switch at the cam with fiber uplink back to the house.

 

[brianegge]

I don’t have a long driveway, but do have a few driveway cams. My system alerts when a vehicle enters the driveway, doing AI on a Jetson nano. It sends me a picture using Pushover and also announces on Alexa. When my AI detects a vehicle it requests SightHound to check the plate and vehicle type. If the plate matched a known one, it’ll tell me in the alert and text. The make/model/color feature works poorly.

 

[Holbs]

I use Blue Iris to send me text with picture upon a triggered camera motion/IVS tripwire alert. Simple
After things settle down a bit... I have a Dahua SD49225XA-HNR 2MP 25x Starlight + IR PTZ AI Camera I installed but is mostly default, which will handle PTZ duties.
Just recieved a Dahua B5442E-Z4E 8-32mm Varifocal for the 100' range to catch humans. Yet to install.
3rd, I have a HFW5241E-Z12E 5-60mm for LPR duties. Yet to install.
Already testing Deepstack AI and OnGuard.
All in all, should be a good combination for 0-200' range for car/plates/human/various detection information to be sent via MQTT to Home Assistant.

 

[welbo97]

So is it imperative to get the video of the vehicle when it is at the creek and 400 yards away? You already have it being announced by your alert system. If you run ethernet cable out to a pole at 100 yards and place the cam there, say a 5241 Z12, you could get a good plate shot at 175-200 feet away from the cam. Others here have gotten good results at that distance. That would be about 230 yards from the creek.

You could even push the distance of the ethernet to about 200 yards or more. Several post here that discuss pushing the ethernet distance or using a POE+ extender to go even further. The 100M theoretical limit for ethernet is for a 1Gig throughput. But cams never need more than 100Meg which can be done for quite a distance beyond 100M.

Additionally, you could run 120VAC out as far as you need, install a POE switch at the cam with fiber uplink back to the house.

There aren't any imperatives on this project yet. I'm feeling out those who've been-there-done-that. I don't relish the thought of digging a 100 yard ditch though. It does sound like a good solid solution though. How do you camouflage a camera on a post in the middle of a field? I think put up a scarecrow and mount the camera in its head looking out the eyeballs.
@brianegge How are your driveway cams communicating, wireless or wired? Is the nano with the camera or in the "media closet"?

The mail truck image is great. If it was 4 times as far away but twice the zoom, it seems like it would still look pretty good. No LPR but plenty good for an image to a phone.

 

[samplenhold]

I don't relish the thought of digging a 100 yard ditch though. It does sound like a good solid solution though. How do you camouflage a camera on a post in the middle of a field? I think put up a scarecrow and mount the camera in its head looking out the eyeballs.

There are a whole bunch of options. Since this is on your property, do you really NEED to camouflage the cam? It does not need to be on a pole. You could mount it on a tree.

There are several threads on hiding a cam, such as in a birdhouse, mailbox, welcome sign, fake yard rock, or as in my case, just a box placed behind a tree. See the second post in the thread below:

LPR Case Study: Scoping, Planning, Proof of Concept, Installation, & Results

Introduction This thread is about my journey into LPR (License Plate Recognition) after having about 18 months of experience with IP cams and having quite a bit of my system finished. I am not an expert on LPR, or IP cameras either. But I have spent a lot of time working with my system and...

ipcamtalk.com

or some others:

Epoe trench 750ft long

Installing a camera and IR light at the outer driveway gate. Dug a shallow 750 ft trench by hand all the way out. Staying home mostly cause of the pandemic..also couldn't see renting a trencher for a 5"deep trench. Running 14 gauge 2 wire for IR light, with a variable power supply where I...

ipcamtalk.com

Mailbox Hide, Newbie Down the Rabbit Hole

I decided that I really needed some street view cameras... long before I realized it would start me down the path to ipcams and Blue Iris. I knew where I wanted cameras, right at the street, in the mailbox and at least somewhat hidden. I schemed about Wi-Fi and solar panels, batteries, voltage...

ipcamtalk.com

Mailbox Hide Cam Swap, Lucky Fitment

The box had a 6mm bullet facing the house with a 6mm looking South and a 2.8 looking North. I decided I wanted to change the cam facing West (to the house) for two reasons: I want a wider FoV to monitor the full width of the lot and ALSO I want to have an audio source (mic) at the mailbox. I...

ipcamtalk.com

LPR Setup SUCCESS with HFW5241E-Z12E

If you place the cam on the tree at the street, how will you get the cable under the sidewalk? I have done that before, when I was much younger, and it was not fun. Plus you have mature trees there. There will be roots galore. Before you commit to that position, you should test it. Also, are you...

ipcamtalk.com

You can rent a trencher or hire someone to do the digging for you. If you go the route of putting 120VAC out there, then you would probably want a licensed electrician to do the job and have him take care of the trenching.

 

[brianegge]

How are your driveway cams communicating, wireless or wired? Is the nano with the camera or in the "media closet"?

Cameras are all wired. Nano is in the media closet, along with hardware NVRs.