Moral-Flexibility.Net

Yesterday saw my daughter leave for her first day of school.

It’s just JK, but it feels like she’s grown up so much already.

When it comes to our household surveillance system I’ve always felt conflicted when discussing any of the “specifics”. This is probably just a side effect of having spent 16 years dealing with security stuff, but I try to listen to my little voice and I’ve tried to strike a balance between sharing information and compromising my own security measures.

Shortly I’ll be posting my “declassified” online journal of my Home Surveillance System (Mark.I) with appropriate screen caps and technical specifications. I feel I can do this as the system now in place (Mark.II - creative names, no?) bears only a passing resemblance to the original.

Some editing is required to make the material coherent, and while it will be remedial to anyone with experience in CCTV it may help others with their own projects and hopefully save them some misteps I made early on.

Stay tuned, I’m working on the editing as we speak.

Yesterday I spent a fair amount of my time up a 20′ ladder, then some more time up that ladder in the rain, and then a little more time up that ladder in the drizzle.

Yes, the ongoing household CCTV project continues, yesterday saw:

1. The removal of old RG6 (for CATV and satellite) from the outside walls of the house (and the holes that had been drilled into the walls sealed).
2. The reconnection of the perimeter cameras on the new permanent wiring and removal of the temporary wiring.
3. Relocation and reconnection of the surveillance system hardware and DVR to it’s new permanent home.

One camera location is giving me trouble, naturally it’s the most difficult to access camera and I was getting frustrated trying to trouble shoot the problem in the rain. I suspect that theres a problem with the wiring as a replacement camera I tried also failed when connected at that location.

I’ll take another shot at it today as I’d like to put this project to bed for a while (although the imminent arrival of a new multiplexer - replacing my multiplexer/switcher cludge - will require me to rewire a bit more in the new future).

Running errands after work, picked up Doomsday for the friday night post-apocalyptic movie screening, and grabbed a bag of Herrs Horseradish and Chedder chips (made specifically for me I swear!).

Ignored was Wargames: The Deadcode (Wargames II? Are you serious?) and Starship Troopers 3: Marauders (Casper Van Diem is back…good career move.).

Time to vegetate… no new developments to report.

While citing US law the advice applies North of the border as well.

[Hat Tip: My 2 second shelf life]

One of the features I loved most about our house when we first looked at it was the backyard. Not the size, for it’s easily one of the smallest back yards I’ve ever seen, but rather the sense of an urban escape, a small private space in the middle or urban sprawl.

(This picture was taken early spring 2006 so it’s not a exactly a fair comparison)

Neither Lisa or I have a green thumb, we’ve had to figure most of this out as we go (and for those relatives with some real horticultural knowledge we thank you for your patience and advice!), and it’s not without a bit of pride that we can say our efforts appear to have been, at least, mildly successful.

We’ve concentrated on the small details, edging the garden space, mulching (thanks to Mom and Chris) the garden areas, weeding the lawn and garden areas and seeding the lawn like mad.

(Picture taken July 2008)

We’re going to keep working on it (flowers or something in the garden space would be a good next step), but it’s been an education already and now we’re having to learn about lawn fertilizer and herbicides and all sorts of strange and wonderful things that never mattered to us before.

(Picture taken July 2008)

The new modulator arrived the other day and was immediately pressed into service by yours truly. Going my preferred route with this sort of thing we’re using a surplused commercial RF Modulator instead of a consumer packaged one.

The results are excellent, well beyond my expectations and the cost was about 50% of the modulator I had previously used (and which had died almost immediately). The downside is that a portion of the manual included with this device is well beyond my level of understanding, so there is the remote possibility that I have configured it incorrectly.

I have ordered a second identical modulator tentatively for use as a “spare” although it may be pressed into service to distribute satellite across the CATV system in the house (more on that cludge later).

The lengths of Coax running up the side of the house have been pulled down, and it looks worlds better, hopefully I can repeat this process on the other side of the house shortly.

Ok, that’s it for now.

The second “drill through an exterior wall and then fish wire down uttering as many curse-words as possible in the process” undertaking was almost painless compared to the first effort. Granted this one was 1/3 the number of wires, but all the same it went fairly smoothly.

One run of cable left and we can get on with the rest of the project.

In anticipation of the new (old) system I’ve taken dozens of photos illustrating the shortcomings of the old system, and a few of the new system now that the more obvious weaknesses have been eliminated.

I’m also getting pretty good at plastering over the holes I cut into the interior walls to facilitate the wiring. I’ll be pretty good at this just in time to finish. Murhpys law, ain’t it?

Now that I have the leisure to plan out the new home for the DVR/Camera stuff I’ve been sketching things out in some detail. I’d like to make it as easy to work on the system as possible, while keeping the mess and clutter to a bar minimum.

Just to give you an example of how messy this is, we’re talking about a dozen 12V power lines running off the supply, 5 RG6 lines in for camera feeds, almost two dozen smaller runs of RG6 split off the switcher, multiplexer and DVR (keeping count? So far thats approximately 40 wires running around in that space).

I figure I’m going to have to rack mount some of this stuff, and create a patch bay of sorts to make re-organizing things easier down the line. I’ve no experience with this so I’m trying to puzzle out the most effective way of doing this.

So far this is what I have, using f-type connectors off the board:

DVR (First Bank of connectors)
8 connectors on the board which feed directly into 8 BNC connectors on the DVR

Cameras (Second bank of connectors)
8 independent feeds (one for each camera), split once for 16 connectors all total.

Multiplexer/Switcher (Third bank of connectors)
12 connectors (inputs for both the multiplexer and switcher)
4 connectors (outputs 3 multiplexer, 1 switcher)

The middle (or second) bank is patched to the upper (first) and lower (third) banks to distribute the video signals (except for one output from the third bank which is fed into the DVR bank)

Wow, this seems to call for 40 connections off the board and a tubload of wire (RG6 with f-types sounds a little labour intensive for this, I can’t help wondering if I can get by with RG59 and RCA connectors instead).

Any thoughts? Bueller?

On reflection f-type connectors would drive me crazy, I’m trying to find a deal on a crap-load of RCA panel mount connectors as that’s probably the easiest (and most economical) way to go.