Hi,
I do IT for a small non profit that is interested in setting up security camera(s) and I'm looking for advice.
First, about me. I write software for a living. I use linux and have no issues, say, in building raspberry pi boxes. That said, whatever I create I want to make sure that other people can use it. I have not done much with security cameras before, other than using Nest.
Next, about the non-profit and our needs. We are a small congregation that meets in a rented facility on weekends. We are writing a grant to improve our security. Our budget for camera equipment (my part of this grant) is around a thousand dollars.
We only need cameras running at the times we meet and they need to be put up and taken down every weekend. The people doing it can plug things in, turn them on, and use a phone app to check that they work, and that's about it. The videos would be used by law enforcement to identify anyone that does anything suspicious or outright illegal. We always have a police officer around at the time we need to run cameras. So, the cameras are not for preventing anything (other than a camera will make someone think twice) but rather they are for looking at video afterwards. Afterwards might mean 2 minutes afterward or it might mean up to 6 months later. So, we would like the ability to look back, quickly, at what happened within the past hour but also look back up to 6 months ago later in the week. We want to record everything and not have some software decide when to record and when to not. We would have, at most, 12 hours a month of video for each camera. Right now, I'm told we only need one camera. My guess is, if we can set up at least two it would be better. They would both be inside. We would like 1080p resolution.
I've looked at several cameras that have cloud storage but none of them support anything close to 6 months. An alternative is load to the cloud and download within a week. Unfortunately nothing that I've found supports an API for doing that and so it's a hack to get the video. That brings up local storage. That would work okay for looking at video later in the week but I'd also like to look at the past hour's worth of storage. For example, if the police officer asks for an image of someone right away then someone should be able to look at the past hour of video.
It would be very good if we could limit any logging in to the cameras to known mac addresses. One other thing, we currently have our own router that we set up for a camera that's used for something else, so setting up a firewall to limit who can login to a camera could be possible.
So, with all that said, are there some obvious, easy solutions I should be looking at?
Thanks,
Matt
I do IT for a small non profit that is interested in setting up security camera(s) and I'm looking for advice.
First, about me. I write software for a living. I use linux and have no issues, say, in building raspberry pi boxes. That said, whatever I create I want to make sure that other people can use it. I have not done much with security cameras before, other than using Nest.
Next, about the non-profit and our needs. We are a small congregation that meets in a rented facility on weekends. We are writing a grant to improve our security. Our budget for camera equipment (my part of this grant) is around a thousand dollars.
We only need cameras running at the times we meet and they need to be put up and taken down every weekend. The people doing it can plug things in, turn them on, and use a phone app to check that they work, and that's about it. The videos would be used by law enforcement to identify anyone that does anything suspicious or outright illegal. We always have a police officer around at the time we need to run cameras. So, the cameras are not for preventing anything (other than a camera will make someone think twice) but rather they are for looking at video afterwards. Afterwards might mean 2 minutes afterward or it might mean up to 6 months later. So, we would like the ability to look back, quickly, at what happened within the past hour but also look back up to 6 months ago later in the week. We want to record everything and not have some software decide when to record and when to not. We would have, at most, 12 hours a month of video for each camera. Right now, I'm told we only need one camera. My guess is, if we can set up at least two it would be better. They would both be inside. We would like 1080p resolution.
I've looked at several cameras that have cloud storage but none of them support anything close to 6 months. An alternative is load to the cloud and download within a week. Unfortunately nothing that I've found supports an API for doing that and so it's a hack to get the video. That brings up local storage. That would work okay for looking at video later in the week but I'd also like to look at the past hour's worth of storage. For example, if the police officer asks for an image of someone right away then someone should be able to look at the past hour of video.
It would be very good if we could limit any logging in to the cameras to known mac addresses. One other thing, we currently have our own router that we set up for a camera that's used for something else, so setting up a firewall to limit who can login to a camera could be possible.
So, with all that said, are there some obvious, easy solutions I should be looking at?
Thanks,
Matt
