Reco please for an IP camera trained on driveway 125 feet away

[nayr]

considering your running LED lighting externally; even if a day/night sensor prove unreliable (mine work great; 100% reliable).. your not talking about alot of energy; you could probably burn that bulb 24/7/365 for a few dollars a year.

A quick online calculator shows a 12w load running 24/7 is $12 a year in electricity; add a dusk/dawn sensor and its gona almost cut that in half and take a few years to pay back the sensor in savings..

$1 a month maximum to save you hundreds in camera equipment? seems like a no brainer.

If you want to be really green up there in the northwest you put up a solar panel and a battery so you only have a video camera the 10 days a year you see the sun

 

[grtaylor]

Yeah, that was my conclusion, running it all night won't cost too much. I have the Insteon controller turning the circuit on 20 mins before sunset, and off 20 mins before dawn, so that's my day/night taken care of.

So a camera without IR (assuming the light level I have will be enough) and no floodlight.

Sometimes it takes a while to process these things...

 

[nayr]

I would be amazed if one unidirectional LED bulb on a post with no real security lighting or IR will be adequate for anything but a glowing orb in a sea of darkness... especially at distance.

parking under a street lamp is barely adequate..

here is a non IR camera relying only on high powered street lamps to see maby 40ft.. all security lighting is off

 

[nayr]

here is a better example, one photo is a 2MP (better low light than 3MP) 3.6mm camera with IR; the light off in the distance is ~130ft according to google maps. The other photo is the same shot without IR.

This guy's light post is pretty bright; I would say @ least 100w or equivalent.. even with a zoom it wouldn't be much lighting to identify anything well.. You still want IR; it will fire up reflectors and animal eyes from as far as the horizon..

You could put an IR spotlight on your light post pointed at the drive entrance; that would spotlight the areas you want to see until they get close enough the built in IR can take over; however a non IR camera wont be able to see such a spotlight and once they leave your light post's range the'll go dark.

You might want a camera with an auto-iris if your getting a zoom lens and looking down a long drive it can refocus as needed.. a 12mm lens should be able to identify vehicles well; might struggle for plates but as its been said you need a dedicated camera for plates as its useless for anything else.. a good verifocal or electronic focal would be next best thing to a PTZ

What about this camera, you can get it with a 7-22mm for ~$450 and its IR should make it 150': http://www.dahuasecurity.com/products/ipc-hfw5200-ira-384.html

 

[icerabbit]

What a development overnight.

You have 110 and insteon? And a lamp post!
Fantastic!
Do you have an ISY?
Or do you link and switch manually?

Do you have an electrical outlet on the post?

Where would you mount the camera and additional IR lighting? Covert? Or doesn't matter? Wifi antenna? (or powerline ethernet - though that may interfere with insteon and be harder to setup)

Now I don't know what post and lamp you have, and how it is wired but here's what I would look at:

Leave the circuit on 24/7. That way camera stuff can run day and night.

You could add a dusk to dawn lamp ring for the bulb possibly, if the lamp enclosure permits it. Even if electricity for an led doesn't run up the bill ... it is nice not to run it 16hrs a day or more in the summer while it is light out.

But anyaway.
Split the power at the lamp post.
One section for the lamp.
One section for an outlet, handy to have.
One section for new equipment.

If no dusk to dawn ring, install an insteon controller for the light fixture. I added a dual receptacle box to my posts to tuck a controller in there, but now they have the micro controller that is like a 1/3 the size. Still a dual box is easier to wire up.

If no receptacle add one.

Passthrough or add a box to run added IR lighting if needed (the led helps, but may be insufficient and a couple basic ir fixtures would be better to supplement night vision or avoid hot spotting from the camera's ir) , poe power to camera and wifi antenna. Could have a small landscape transformer for 12v ir lights.

You can run the camera and wifi antenna up a tree if you have a metal stylish lamp post and adding more than two boxes onto it would start to look like out of place. May not be an issue for you. You may have a wooden post or have the ability to add a little wooden camera post with cam + extra ir if needed and wifi antenna. The details there are going to vary a bit based on what post and fixture you have, proximity to the driveway, desired aesthetics, ... but with 110 there, you are golden to run a few extra things inexpensively, one or two basic bullet cams (one generic wider, one a bit more tele for tags specific at night?) and beaming it back vs getting into a $$$$ camera.

If needed and you want a heads up regarding needing to see who or what goes past, live.
Add one or two drive way alerts farther out and have an ability to live view that camera in a couple places in your house or have a mobile device handy that is ready to view that camera.

 

[icerabbit]

PS: I just realized what you meant regarding all fixtures, that power to the lamp post is not on its own circuit or that you have multiple lights tied to that circuit. Since you are controlling it with insteon, I think you could probably add a micro controller to each fixture or post, without any modifications, to leave power on at the post. If you figure out where it splices in the garage, basement, yard ... you may be able to reduce the number of controllers you need to two (one for the post, one for the rest).

In the end, it is worth it. I could have eliminated a couple controllers too, but I wanted the versatility at each lamp post to have power without lights on, wanted the repeater function of propagating the insteon signal down hundreds feet of line all the way to the road.

Figure, instead of a single $$$$ camera on the house, it is a bundle of a few $50 insteon controllers, an inexpensive 3mp bullet camera, poe inector to power it, a basic wifi bridge and some elecrtrical hardware.

And in less than ideal weather you will see a bit better, as the camera would be on location instead of trying to see through some mist, fog, rain, snow (depending on where you live of course).

Anyhow. Everything has pros and cons.

 

[grtaylor]

There are always pros and cons.

I had considered micro on/off in each lamppost. That's $250 for the posts. I still might do that, as having power that far down the driveway all the time would be useful, but my reasoning against was I didn't want to use wi-fi for the camera. It's never as reliable as a piece of copper and cannot provide the bandwidth for a high def camera, unless I also look into changing my router and then, and then.. soon the cost isn't much different than a higer quality camera. 6 of one and all that.

Still, power down there does mean an IR light down there.

 

[icerabbit]

(the forum ate my post! )

Modules do add up. I tell my wife every component whether switch or controller add an extra $50. But I couldn't be happier with the functionality. Not cheap. Had to do a fair bit of work, but we did not want the lights to be on all night or throughout the course of pretty much all winter, drawing attention to the entrance of the property. I refurbished the posts at the same time. And I have used the extra receptacle on the lamp posts to control additional lighting.

If all posts are in line, and the camera / lights post is in the middle, you might be able to do three posts with 1 controller, maybe?, saving you some money.

Wifi can handle the ipcam streams fine because mine average out to about 1MB/s at 1920x1080 above average fps and quality. Even with higher settings and full 3MP it wouldn't require the latest and greatest wifi kit.

You wouldn't need a new router. You'd probably look at a wifi bridge between two access points, antenna aimed at each other.

Of course if you do power line ethernet back to the house, you can avoid wifi. I was worried about interference between power line ethernet and instead, but a couple threads at the smart home forum suggest that at least with some products, it shouldn't be an issue:
http://forum.smarthome.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=14491

Of course you'd need to dedicate a receptacle at the post and maybe add one in the house on that particular line to be the ethernet in/out.