Moral-Flexibility.Net

Despite the relative warmth I spent a good portion of today running wires, drilling holes, cursing, muttering, drilling more holes, cursing and muttering some more and finally filling holes simply to provide a break from the muttering.

Yes, this was the beginning of the long awaited CCTV system overhaul and final installation. The first step was finishing the hole in our exterior wall to run cable through (this is the first of three such holes). Sadly my 12″ masonry bit proved to be just a bit short (no kidding…) and some improvisation was called for, in the end para cord was fished through the wall and awaits the effort of pulling wire through a hole that is not noticeably larger in diameter than the wire.

Deciding not to irritate myself any further I started running wire to the permanent location for the DVR, UPSs and so forth (telco, CAT5, RG6, RG59 and power wire along with a GFI outlet - I’ll need to install another breaker for this, but at least the wire is there). Then having done the legwork for that I revisited the CCTV/CATV distribution system (there are pictures of this, but my installation of Paint Shop Pro got corrupted so you’ll have to wait until tommorow to see it) for the house and discovered through trial and error that the combiner/distributor module I’d acquired was NFG, and instead improvised using splitters as combiners.

I discovered that the material I had read online about satellite and CATV happily residing on the same coax doesn’t apply here. Although the two may reside on different frequency ranges any attempt to introduce them both onto the same line results in neither working (actually on reflection this may not be true, as this series of tests was conducted before I discovered the combiner/distributor was NFG).

The upshot is that the CCTV feed happily resides at channel 75, and if I can get another distribution module then I can make sure that every TV in the house can see the cameras. I’ll need another video amplifier, as the one I had originally pushing the multiplexed signal through the house was less than adequate to the task, and the video quality is rapidly diminishing.

So, ending the day I need;

• A new combiner/distributor module for our CATV.
• A new video signal amplifier for the Multiplexor Feed.
• New breaker for my main panel

I’m working some long shifts this week and get a long weekend for my trouble, so hopefully I’ll make some real progress on this soon.

I should also build a new Linux DVR box with a larger HD and better DVR cards (higher FPS rates) as long as I’m relocating the system, but I’ll have to do some shopping around on prices. The existing system is adequate, just not perfect.

Did that make sense to anyone but me? Did anyone actually read down to this part?

-GRIN-

(I’ll post pictures, promise!)

So, rationalizing our television feeds has meant a whole lot of reading for me. We currently have standard CATV, Satellite and the CCTV feeds running on seperate lines throughout the house. I’d planned to rewire the existing arrangement (eliminating the satellite and CATV coax running up and down the side of the house) and fishing wires up to the bedrooms and living rooms from the basement.

Obviously the less wire I have to run the better. I’ve been looking into obtaining a modulator to add the CCTV feed to the existing CATV, and possibly tacking on the satellite feed (one receiver in the living room) as well for the upstairs TVs (this wouldn’t allow us to change the channels on the satellite, but if we wanted to watch a movie upstairs that was on satellite downstairs it would save us the effort of renting another receiver).

It seems that this can be accomplished fairly easily using a Notch Filter and two modulators to feed the CCTV and Satellite feeds onto specific channels on the CATV feed.

Of course it only seems easy, I’m sure there are all sorts of hiccups waiting in the wings, any readers have any experience with this sort of thing? Are there pitfalls I should watch out for? Is this an overly complicated simple solution?

I don’t see myself as paranoid, let’s be clear on that (and what paranoid person would admit to paranoia anyway?), but sixteen years of mopping up the after-effects of people being unpleasant to each other leaves one with a slightly cynical view as to the safety and security we generally take for granted in our society.

I installed the first version of our CCTV system shortly after we moved into our house. New houses and neighborhoods bring strange new noises with them, and I didn’t want my sweetie creeping downstairs each time she heard a noise just to set her mind at ease. We spent $200 on some cheap cameras and a suplused multiplexer and I spent a few of my days off running cable, fashioning housings for the cameras and installing them. A quick click of the remote control could show the doors and windows on the TV and verify that all was well, no creeping required.

I’m a tinkerer by nature, and despite the fact that Lisa was satisfied with the existing arrangement I slowly began to upgrade the various components of the system to my satisfaction. This addressed concerns I had with the quality of the cameras, maintenance and effort free recording and power-loss protection for the entire system.

I’ve still a little way to go, our basement reno project will see the system rewired a bit and I want to add a modulator that will include the CCTV feed on channel 2 of our cable (this requires a cable, satellite and CCTV distribution system to be added to clean up the existing cabling nightmare), and the camera feed added to the multi-station intercom system I’ll be adding in the near future.

We’re officially beyond the “sense of security” phase of the project, and I’ll admit that I’m playing at this point, but it keeps me off the streets so it’s not all bad.

Every time we walk through Home Despot I swing by the “shiny kit” electonics aisle and check out the “CCTV in a can” packages. For a mere $300 you can have a wireless camera and a generic black and white monitor keeping an eye on your home. Imagine the peace of mind! Scare criminals away! Amuse your friends! Impress your co-workers!

Sure.

We’re about $600 into our system as it stands, which includes the cameras (including the uber-cheapo CMOS cameras we started with), cabling, a multiplexer and a switcher, DVR cards, a computer, monitors (1 crt and 1 lcd) and two UPSs. The system (while not technically a “covert” install) is hardly noticable (and as such provides no real deterrent value) and covers approximately 85% of the house perimeter, and ALL exterior access points.

How do you do this on a budget? I’ll tell you, and you decide if this advice is worth anything.

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In the process of getting ZoneMinder to work properly on my Ubuntu computer I’ve installed and reinstalled both several times. It seems Ubuntu is really not the best Linux distribution for Zoneminder according to the support forums. It will work, but it will take some effort.

I’m pleased to say that this most recent attempt functions as it should, and I’ve yet to see any problems. To save myself the effort next time around I figured I’d record the installation procedure that worked for me. I know most readers don’t care about this, so the instructions are below the cut.

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Ok, we’ve been running ZoneMinder for over a week and I’ve formed a few impressions as to how it fares compared to the other software (Windows XP stuff) we had originally monkeyed with;

• Stability - So far ROCK SOLID. No crashes, even when I attempted to induce them, or any evidence of data corruption.
• Flexibility - Amazing. Zoneminder allows the user to configure a number of different types of “zones” within the video window to specifically configure how and what the system should interpret as movement. Most usefull (and missing from any other package I have played with) are the “preclusive” zones. Zones only a few pixels across that are set to trap sudden lighting changes and prevent any alarms being triggered within that frame. This was a major problem with the previous packages as the headlights of our neighbors across the street, and of cars making a turn a half block down would generally trigger an alarm. With Zoneminder I am seeing less that 30% false alarms (meaning no ACTUAL movement took place) and I am still in the midst of fine tuning.
• Ease of use - Excellent. All the problems I have enountered to date stemmed from my unfamiliarity with Linux, the documentation for Zoneminder is excellent, as are the support forums.

I have encountered a few minor problems, but they are more asthetic than functional in nature, and do not affect the recording, alarm generation or review of images.

As you, my good reader, are no doubt aware our little home is ringed with cameras which are fed into the various TVs in the house. Recording of these cameras was relegated to Lisas tired old PII 350Mhz machine running pirated Pico2000 software (Don’t worry, I bought the legitimate version from Centerlink when I discovered it). Reliability was always an issue, and required at least daily checks to ensure the recording was ongoing and no “catastrophic error” message was found displayed on the monitor.

The answer to this problem came in the form of some random surfing, when I came across ZoneMinder, a free package for Linux designed specifically to monitor cameras for movement, alert the user and record the movement. The price was certainly right, the only down side was that it was for a Linux system, and I have ZERO experience with Linux (beyond the odd webserver chmod command anyway).

Some more reading was required for Linux, and eventually I settled on the Ubuntu distribution as recommended to be forgiving on newbies. Installation of Ubuntu was a snap, and I had to take three different attempts to get ZoneMinder working (the bulk of the problems stemming from my ignorance of Linux, and my creating too much clutter and mess).

As it stands now however ZoneMinder is running. I have to abuse test it for a while, so I can’t comment on it’s stability but it seems like an incredibly flexible package thus far.

The configuration of our home surveillance system has undergone a series of changes as it’s been installed. It currently stands at five perimeter cameras fed through a switcher/multiplexor. The multiplexor feed is wired directly to the televisions within the house (as aux input), a single dedicated monitor and into a DVR computer. The computer also has dedicated feeds from three of the cameras for higher resolution recording of “priority” cameras. The DVR computer is, in turn, networked to my desktop PC for onscreen viewing of any of the recorded camera feeds.

I had originally envisioned using the dedicated computer as little more than a VCR for the multiplexor feed, and it was only as a result of finding a 4 channel video card that I revised this plan on the fly. The use of the 4 channel card would appear to render the switcher and multiplexor redundant, but I prefer a system with less reliance on the computer, and even if the computer crashes or reboots the multiplexed feed continues to the monitors within the house.

The software that came bundled with the 4 channel card allows 24/7 recording of the multiplexor feed, and a “motion activated” recording of the three additional cameras if, and when, required. As a consequence approx 15gig of hard drive space is consumed for 6 days of footage, which is automatically overwritten in an endless loop.

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