Weather Cam project with IPC-HDW5231R-Z Starlight

[TVT73]

Hello guys,
my cam from andy is now online and is used a a weather watching cam. At the moment, it´s mounted on the air ventilation outlet on my roof at home, but on April it will replace my old 3mp Trendnet TV-IP310PI on my camping place.

I have some points i want to do better with the new one:
- traffic consumption, the old one uses much bandwidth with much less details. The traffic is expensive because i need an LTE mobile connection with "only" 30gb/month but my children and wife are consuming most of it in a few days a month
- spider and other ones are loving the Trendnet cam, because i can´t deactivate ir in nightview mode.
- better picture quality on day and night (Trendnet 0,07 lux without IR)
- I wants to catch lightnings
- more field of view, the trendnet has only 70°

Maybe later on i will take it on my website, if i find a solution how to multicast it over my website and not directly from the cam. I am no web designer, so my skills for website is really low.

Why did i chose the Dahua Starlight HDW5231R-Z? Based on the experience from Nayr, i thought this cam is exactly the best cheap solution for lowlight setups. And I wasn´t disappointed.

Altough, i found some bugs in the cam firmware, its a great cam. But more later to theses bugs.

But first of all, the most interesting, what is possible and some picture examples.

Night view, The colors are real... in the background is industrie

with active BLC default Mode:


It´s possible with these settings.

It´s not usefull to raise Gain more, because the picture is getting to bright. No one would belive, its night

Shutter is maximum 40ms because of using WDR!



The new firmware is able for Smart Codec. It reduces the bitrate to very low values. When watching over android Tinycam Monitor or gDMSS lite App it´s 10 times less...





to be continued ...

 

[TVT73]

These are the pictures with my old Trendnet cam. Not really bad for an 4 year old one.



If i raise gain to 100, it looks like day time but it´s not wanted from me.

 

[nayr]

sweet, I been waiting to see someone use these for a weather/webcam..

the easiest way to put it on your website is to stream it to youtube/ustream/etc and then just embed that into your site..

 

[TVT73]

List of bugs (2.460.0000.1.R):
- when using smart codec only video, audio and abnormality is possible. But maybe it´s not wanted, i had one time after default reset also ivs and all the other stuff, till i reboot the cam.
- switching day/night with manual mode / shutter customized mode will cause the day profile will be fixed on night frame rate. I am analysing this behaviour. Same with gain priority.
The bug is related to the profil switching by time. The manual mode shutter speed will change if the profil normal mode is used. It´s only a minor bug. see 2.R
- really sad, the timestamp for emails is still always in GMT +8. Although the bug is know for dahua since several months, it had not been solved. This is discussed here.

New Problems with 2.R:
- biggest disadvantage is loosing telnet! Is it wanted or not? It´s not documented... it´s for security reasons changed
- codechanges for smart codec gives new problems with several settings, when using it:
- Bitrate selection is maximum 1792 ???? -> This is coming togehter with the frame rate. At night with only 3 Frames the profile allows 1792, at day with 25 frames i can switch to 4mbit.
- When choosing normal profil with mode manual and custom range 0 ... 333 the maximum framerate is now 3!!! you can´t change it to higher frame rates. The maximum framerate in custom range is defined by the slowest shutter setting. That´t also in my opinion a new bug.
Solution:
When configuring it´s necessary to run on profile day for day settings and night for night settings. So we need to switch from scheduled mode to selected profil. After configuring both settings, we can change back to scheduled profile mode and then it´s working as expected!

 

[looney2ns]

Nice job. I'll be doing this as well. Replacing my aging Axis 211a cam that's currently on my roof.

Current cam.

I played around with the new PTZ the other night as well, it works GREAT as a weather cam.

 

[nayr]

are you switching day/night profiles manually? or switching it from color/black&white?

what abnormality are you experiencing? Do you have a SD card in it? Does the anomaly also occur on locally recorded media? perhaps its your client.

 

[bp2008]

I've been waiting for a camera that can match a 60 second exposure with Olympus SP-500UZ (6 megapixel point and shoot camera from 10 years ago).



I still don't think it will happen any time soon. Those pictures were taken in the middle of the night. Granted, with a full moon.

 

[nayr]

never seen an IP camera that let you do a 60s exposure, were lucky to get 1/3s let alone 1min

if your wanting to do really long exposures your best bet is try the Cannon Development kit, you can script it to take photographs with whatever settings you want.. then transfer the images via USB to a Raspberry Pi or something that streams em to the internet.. You could piece it together with an old Cannon camera and still end up cheaper than a Dahua Eco Starlight with alot better results.. but it'll be a hack thats for sure.

 

[bp2008]

I agree, I've seen great long exposures come from canon SLRs being automated this way. But I need one that powers on automatically in case of a power outage, and that isn't the sort of thing listed in spec sheets. It isn't even the sort of thing you can ask an owner of a camera.

Kind of sucks, I have to use a Windows PC to control these Olympus cameras and they are not 100% reliable so you need to automatically power cycle the cameras when they stop responding; thats another $130 for a web power switch. If you don't have that then you have the situation where the camera is down for weeks at a time because the guy who lives next to it keeps forgetting to power cycle it.

 

[TVT73]

I've been waiting for a camera that can match a 60 second exposure with Olympus SP-500UZ (6 megapixel point and shoot camera from 10 years ago).
...
I still don't think it will happen any time soon. Those pictures were taken in the middle of the night. Granted, with a full moon.

Of course we are not able to achieve a 6mp picture. But the 1080p resolution with 3pic/s is really near to you. Unfortunately i have no stars seen the last days with clear weather condition. But wait for my pics. And when the cam is on the caravan, i have much less disturbing ground light. Its on 500m over see, the air is also very clear, so i can also hopefully take nice star picture shots.

 

[bp2008]

Can't wait to see them.

 

[TVT73]

are you switching day/night profiles manually? or switching it from color/black&white?

what abnormality are you experiencing? Do you have a SD card in it? Does the anomaly also occur on locally recorded media? perhaps its your client.

i have seen it in live view. I don´t record at the moment, no sdcard installed. It looks similar like an old negative picture. On day times with wdr at 50-80. I will try to capture a picture of it. But it´s maybe only a much more sensitive wdr range.
i use a profile time based schedule. Unfortunately dahua is still not able to switch by illumination level on day / night. I still don´t understand, why the didn´t add these simple feature.

 

[TVT73]

Can't wait to see them.

Have a look on the pic of a cheap ipc-hdw4421. I expect a much better picture. Its in the same direction, but on the ground level. too less details, but stars are visible.But it´s in b/w mode. and in foreground the ir led is on, at really low level fixed.
Dahua Starlight Varifocal Turret (IPC-HDW5231R-Z)

 

[nayr]

for a weather cam I suspect WDR is going to me more trouble than its worth.. I switch profiles externally at sunrise/sunset and Ive encountered settings that seem like they would not take.. drove me crazy then I reset all the video settings to defaults and set it up again; then the problem went away.. seen this on 2 separate cameras, some sort of bad config I suspect.. the first one fixed its self after tweaking some settings and took me a while to discover, so I reset the other one and it was fixed too.

 

[TVT73]

@nayr , yes i am also not sure if wdr is really necessary. And i maybe need to turn the cam more up, for getting less foreground light. For day view, its really dark in foreground. It depends on what i want to achieve. Better cloud quality or a mix of cloud and ground. The dynamic range is good without it, but with it, it will handle better the early evening sun, so it will be interesting how good it can cover it in both settings.

But at home it´s not the same as on the camp side. The city industry light is much to bright, the humidity is worth for it and it´s too much visible. As for normal photography best advise is, the less civilisation light, the better the night picture.

from my other dahuas i know, that the wdr is also making sometimes trouble. The picture went to dark, or it needs more contrast.

Switching the profil for sunrise/sunset would be the best way, maybe you can help me for using it on my raspy which runs in my caravan later on. It does the vpn tunnel for the lte network.

The clouds are gone, but not humidity...

 

[nayr]

Install Domoticz on your Pi, this is the Lua script I use for switching my profiles and doing various other things:
domoticz-scripts/script_time_ipc.lua at master · nayrnet/domoticz-scripts · GitHub

 

[TVT73]

I need to prove, if it will runs together with the setup of feste-ip.net for raspberry pi. For the first look it seems to be possible.

 

[TVT73]

2 different Daytime Settings:
my favorit:

- Saturation on maximum
- BLC mode custom with a box on the sky without ground
- Exposure with gain priority and maximum 60
- 3dnr 70

- without BLC mode
- Exposure mode the same
- Saturation 50

It look too dark for me. Maybe a little bit more brightness? But this depends on the used screen for watching the picture.

 

[TVT73]

Color Mode B&W Mode same settings


Today´s weather conditions are better. The bright dot is really a star, the other ones are a bit to dark. But for this amount of city lights its just a really great picture quality.

The settings:



Rest Settings:
White Balance Auto
Day&Night only color or b&w
ir light off

Codec h265 with smart enabled. 4Mbit with VBR6 and 25 frames/s
In color Mode PSS gets 820kbit and in B&W mode 3700kbit.

I found out, that only in normal mode profil the manual customized shutter range is working! with day and night profil, the shutter will remains on 333ms on day. In normal mode it changes early in the morning with sunrise at 25 frames/s.

 

[TVT73]

An example of heavy light situations with the sun in the picture. BLC Mode works better than WDR! But the saturation has to be adjusted.