Review-OEM 4mp AI Cam IPC-T5442TM-AS Starlight+

The change in sunrise/sunset times can be a PITA. Just sayin'.
 
You will have to adjust the times, more than once a year. As daylight increases, or decreases, you will have to adjust it.
 
The thing is, with the exception of LPR, it’s not really needed very often. 10-15 min either way doesn’t usually matter much.

With my LPR cameras, I have them switch a good 45 min before sunset/after sunrise, so I typically adjust them 2-3 times per year.
 
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Before winter and after, each month loses, or gains like an hour of light. The rest of the years is all good.
 
Before winter and after, each month loses, or gains like an hour of light. The rest of the years is all good.
That really depends on your latitude. When I lived in Lagos, Nigeria sunrise and sunset varied only 18 minutes over the whole year.
 
Lagos, Nigeria? I think I'll stick to a more northern latitude, even though it's NJ it's better than Lagos.
 
it's better than Lagos.
I lived there for five years. Miss it and the expat life. Never a dull moment. Best job I ever had. Made some great friends their from all over the world. Makes one appreciate what we have here in the USA.
 
I traveled, a lot, back in the 80's but only the States and Territories. Nicest place was Guam, not on related to military travel, but the beach on the AFB was right out of Blue Lagoon. Still appreciated getting back to the mainland though. You don't really know or appreciate what we have here unless and until you go somewhere else in this world.
 
The change in sunrise/sunset times can be a PITA. Just sayin'.

It's a pity there's no where to pull sunset / sunrise times into the software from. Most weather reports contain these and I'm sure somewhere academic or meteriological will publish a table of times for the entire year. Even if you could only retreive the date daily from a local weather site, that could be sufficient to say set sunset - 1 hour, and sunrise + 1 hour for change overs (or whatever time you required). Where you come unstuck is bad waether as often then it goes dark and hour or two early.
 
That is why we have the sunrise and sunset "app".
 
It's a pity there's no where to pull sunset / sunrise times into the software from. Most weather reports contain these and I'm sure somewhere academic or meteriological will publish a table of times for the entire year. Even if you could only retreive the date daily from a local weather site, that could be sufficient to say set sunset - 1 hour, and sunrise + 1 hour for change overs (or whatever time you required). Where you come unstuck is bad waether as often then it goes dark and hour or two early.
Read my last post (#1,121). Sunwait can do all of that. You just feed it your lat/long and it will get sunrise/sunset for any location on earth. You can then have it execute commands based on those times or add an offset to them + or -. You can even have it set to activate from civil, nautical, and astronomical twilight and even angle of the sun above/below the horizon.

Usage instructions: risacher/sunwait
 
That is why we have the sunrise and sunset "app".


I thought it was said above it no longer worked?

Anyway, I've thought of a physical solution if anyone can make it work. I have one of these on one of my outdoor lights. Works brilliantly and the best aspect is, the weather doesn't matter because if it goes dark early or gets light later because of bad weather, it still works at the right time, because it detects light levels rather than times:


The heads wear out eventually but you can get replacement heads for around 1/2 the rpice of the entire sensor which is cheap enough anyway. The only issue is how BI could detect the trigger.
 
The sunrise/sunset app still works very well. Given the newer cameras, from the 5231 and now the 5442, they work well in low light so if it gets dark early they still see well. Not much of a problem at all.
 
I have setup all my cameras(11) with this app, and they all work great.
 
It's a pity there's no where to pull sunset / sunrise times into the software from. Most weather reports contain these and I'm sure somewhere academic or meteriological will publish a table of times for the entire year. Even if you could only retreive the date daily from a local weather site, that could be sufficient to say set sunset - 1 hour, and sunrise + 1 hour for change overs (or whatever time you required). Where you come unstuck is bad waether as often then it goes dark and hour or two early.

I use the following BASH script to do that on my Synology NAS. It runs every day and calculates sunrise-20min and sunset+20min. It then sleeps until sunset+19Min. There is other code in the script which changes the start/end time for night mode. On one of my cameras I manually set "Normal" mode at sunset+20 and then at midnight another script switches it to night mode - this to deal with landscape lighting that runs until midnight. With minor modification it should work on any flavor of Linux (including MacOS)
!/bin/bash
location="AUS"
# we get all the web page
# we get the original sunrise/sunset time values
sunrise_str=$(echo $allfile | sed -ne '/Sunrise/{s/.<Sunrise>\(.\)<\/Sunrise>.*/\1/p;q;}')
sunset_str=$(echo $allfile | sed -ne '/Sunset/{s/.<Sunset>\(.\)<\/Sunset>.*/\1/p;q;}')
# we convert time values to Time in 24-hour format
sunset=$(date --date="$sunset_str +20 minutes" +%T)
sunrise=$(date --date="$sunrise_str -20 minutes" +%T)
sunsetsec=$(date --date="$sunset_str +19 minutes" +%s)
now=$(date)
nowsec=$(date +%s)
sleeptime=$(( sunsetsec - nowsec ))
echo "$now Setting sunrise $sunrise, sunset $sunset in $sleeptime seconds" >> timechange.log
sleep $sleeptime
 
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