Newbie with questions

[Old-Steve]

Hey everybody - I'm Old Steve from So Cal

I have had an old analog camera system for years and then a couple of weeks ago it took a sh@t dive. It kept trying to upgrade the firmware and it was stuck in a reboot loop.
I have another one at my shop and it did the same thing at about the same time so I wonder if the NVR company got hacked.
I don't care, Anyway, it was past time for an upgrade.

I pieced together a system on Amazon. When I got it and hooked it up the NVR had been used. It had someone's email account in it and I could not log in.
I returned it for an exchange. I wanted a NEW one this time. I am trying to get this done over Labor Day weekend. Amazon handed off the replacement to UPS and UPS lost it. Then they found it but the soonest they can deliver it is Sept 3, after Labor Day.

So I ordered another one. A stand alone NVR and 2 cameras. Not a bundle. They came the next day no problem. I am back on track, more or less. I am half way through the weekend and I am about half ways done.

While I was impatiently waiting for an NVR to arrive, I hooked up a PC and installed Blue Iris and was able to get most of the cameras going that way, through a POE switch.
Then when I got the NVR I got that going as well. I see here on this forum how to run the NVR and Blue Iris at the same time. I will work on that.

I have a question about IP Cameras. I want to add a simple toggle switch so I can turn off a camera when I want to. I thought that by interrupting either the blue or brown pair which I thought was power, that would do it, but no. The camera kept running. I cut the orange pair and the camera stopped. I think this is what I want. My question is by installing a DPDT toggle switch on the orange and orange/white wires will that hurt anything in the long run? It seems to work but I don't know much about IP cameras so I wanted to ask.

I just want to be able to flip a switch while I am walking by a certain camera to turn it off, then turn it back on again with no ill effects.

This was super easy on an old analog camera with Siamese cable lol old school

Thanks in advance!

 

[Ri22o]

The simplest way would be to use a POE injector to power the camera instead of the POE switch. You could then just turn off the injector to cut power to the camera.

 

[TonyR]

If it's a camera that's streaming to BI, either directly or via the NVR, you could also open a browser on the BI server to this HTTP command below to disable the camera, then issue the 2nd one to re-enable it. You can bookmark/make a favorite of both, even place a shortcut on the desktop of the BI server or a PC, tablet or smartphone's on the same LAN.

NOTE: In BI "web server" => "Advanced" have "use secure session keys and login page" UNchecked.

http://BI-Server-IP:BI-Port/admin?camera=CameraShortName&enable=0&user=Username&pw=Password

http://BI-Server-IP:BI-Port/admin?camera=CameraShortName&enable=1&user=Username&pw=Password

 

[mat200]

Hey everybody - I'm Old Steve from So Cal

I have had an old analog camera system for years and then a couple of weeks ago it took a sh@t dive. It kept trying to upgrade the firmware and it was stuck in a reboot loop.
I have another one at my shop and it did the same thing at about the same time so I wonder if the NVR company got hacked.
I don't care, Anyway, it was past time for an upgrade.

I pieced together a system on Amazon. When I got it and hooked it up the NVR had been used. It had someone's email account in it and I could not log in.
I returned it for an exchange. I wanted a NEW one this time. I am trying to get this done over Labor Day weekend. Amazon handed off the replacement to UPS and UPS lost it. Then they found it but the soonest they can deliver it is Sept 3, after Labor Day.

So I ordered another one. A stand alone NVR and 2 cameras. Not a bundle. They came the next day no problem. I am back on track, more or less. I am half way through the weekend and I am about half ways done.

While I was impatiently waiting for an NVR to arrive, I hooked up a PC and installed Blue Iris and was able to get most of the cameras going that way, through a POE switch.
Then when I got the NVR I got that going as well. I see here on this forum how to run the NVR and Blue Iris at the same time. I will work on that.

I have a question about IP Cameras. I want to add a simple toggle switch so I can turn off a camera when I want to. I thought that by interrupting either the blue or brown pair which I thought was power, that would do it, but no. The camera kept running. I cut the orange pair and the camera stopped. I think this is what I want. My question is by installing a DPDT toggle switch on the orange and orange/white wires will that hurt anything in the long run? It seems to work but I don't know much about IP cameras so I wanted to ask.

I just want to be able to flip a switch while I am walking by a certain camera to turn it off, then turn it back on again with no ill effects.

This was super easy on an old analog camera with Siamese cable lol old school

Thanks in advance!

Hi @Old-Steve

If you have good quality coax / siamese cabling, why not just upgrade your DVR analog kit ?

 

[Flintstone61]

Once you go IP you won't miss Analog. Especially for the tunability of the 4mp 1/1.8 Dahua/Empiretech cams.
reviewing video for me, was better in BI. I have both NVR and BI running for the sake of learning, and comparing, I have found that my BI setup will restart on power failure, but it waits for an admin/login before it starts as a service.
the NVR will begin recording again automagically filling the gap for me in a power failure.

 

[Old-Steve]

Well I'm coming down the home stretch. I pretty much finished up last night and now I have some clean up to do. Getting rid of the trash and making some of the uglier runs look a little nicer. Garage runs - who cares anyway lol But you know - happy wife happy life - got to make it look "acceptable" lol

I had set up almost all of the cams temporarily in my office so when I hooked everything back up again it was plug n play. Pretty painless. I just had to fine tune and aim the cameras.

I went from 1080 analog cams with 2 PTZ cams and now I have all 4K cams and 5 are PTZ. A couple of them even track. Wohoo! lol

I set up the NVR and the PC in my home office. I placed the POE switch in the garage. I ran my camera cables to the POE switch, then the POE switch has 2 Ethernet cables that run back to the office. One cable comes from the router and goes to the POE switch in the garage, the other cable goes from the POE switch back to the NVR and PC. This way I have 2 ethernet cable going from the office to the garage, instead of multiple cables, one for each camera. I thought it would be more efficient this way, and it seems to be, but I am not familiar with IP camera wiring best practices, so I hope I stumbled into the correct set up. Please let me know if you notice anything glaringly wrong.

I just LOVE the RJ45 pass through connectors. I don't think I've made a bad cable since I started using these. I discovered the secret, strip the jacket back a good 3". That gives you lots of room to straighten out and order the wires. Then insert them one at a time building from orange/white and work across to brown. Crimp and cut. Check and verify. TADAAA!!!

I didn't really get an answer if it was ok to cut the orange and orange/white wires to temporarily kill a camera. So I guess I'll be the Guinea Pig!
I don't want to log in somewhere, I don't want to add a POE injector after my POE switch, I just want a simple on/off toggle switch. Like a light switch lol The simpler the better.

Thanks everybody, I am relatively new to IP cams but in other areas I am the answer guy so it's nice to have somewhere to go where I can ask questions.
And vent lol

 

[TonyR]

I didn't really get an answer if it was ok to cut the orange and orange/white wires to temporarily kill a camera.

Yes.....your camera, your wire, by all means go for it.

Should you decide you'd like to do it from your phone or remotely, reconsider my method in post #3.

 

[Old-Steve]

 

[Old-Steve]

Thanks Tony for all your help. I didn't do it your way but you got me thinking about how to do it my way with a phone. I already have a a lot of wifi switches and stuff that I control from my phone so I am kind of surprised I didn't think of this on my own. Eventually probably but you sped that up so thank you.

Instead of using a switch I ran the orange pair through a dpdt relay on the nc side. The relay is off 95% of the time and the orange pair flow through the nc contacts in the relay and the camera functions as normal.

When I energize the relay and the contacts open then the video from the camera stops. I turn the relay back off and the camera comes back on line in about 15 to 30 seconds.

I tied the relay coil to the output of a wifi switch. So I can control the relay from my phone. I can also set a schedule and different triggers and stuff. So I have it programmed so if I turn on a certain light switch at a certain time of day then that will trigger my “camera off” relay. Then when I turn the light switch back off the relay turns off and the camera returns to normal.

It's just something stupid that I wanted to do like I didn't want a video record of something like every time I went to a bathroom or something lol Nothing illegal or sinister so sorry if I got anybodies imagination going lol

It worked out better than I had planned.

 

[TonyR]

I tied the relay coil to the output of a wifi switch. So I can control the relay from my phone.

Glad you got it going in the method that works for you.
I understand you came up with the Wi-Fi switch and the phone app later, but had I known that from the beginning, like yourself, I would have suggested a Shelly Wi-Fi switch to perform the camera disable/enable.

Thread 'Simple Blue Iris I/O using Shelly1 Wi-Fi Devices'

Jul 24, 2021

Simple Blue Iris I/O using Shelly1 Wi-Fi Devices

I spent hours assembling the info and the images but could not post, not sure why, maybe it was too lengthy. Anyway, I still wanted to share so below you find a PDF attached of the process to use Shelly Wi-Fi switches to send input to BI and to act on output from BI.

Enjoy!

• TonyR
• Replies: 15
• Forum: Customizing

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