| Box cameras |
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| Five of these box cameras will be used in housings. As well as capturing clear images of activity around the building, these cameras will provide a visual deterrent to potential intruders.
This camera model was chosen for its impressive specifications: it features a Sony Ex-View HAD CCD sensor with a resolution of 500 TV Lines, and a low-light rating of 0.1 Lux when providing a colour picture. In extremely low light, it switches to black-and-white mode, enabling clear vision down to 0.02 Lux.
The lens is auto-iris, a requirement when installing a camera outdoors (otherwise the camera's sensor may be damaged by direct sunlight). The lens also features an optical zoom, which will be set on-site to get the best framing for the particular camera location.
Cost: £160 each from RF Concepts. |
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| Bullet camera |
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| This camera will be installed into a hole drilled into the frame of the front door. It uses a Sony Ex-View HAD CCD sensor with a resolution of 580 TV Lines and a low-light rating of 0.1 Lux. The front door will have illumination during the night to provide enough light for this camera to work effectively. This camera has a 3.6mm wide-angle lens, allowing it to effectively capture subjects that are quite close.
Cost: £135 from Datatoys. |
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| Microphone |
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| This microphone will be placed near the front door camera to record conversations at the door. It has a pass-through power connector so that it can use the same power supply as the camera. The microphone will be connected to the built-in audio input of the computer.
Cost: £15 from RF Concepts. |
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| Video input card |
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| An Active Silicon LFG4 card was chosen as it has four separate video digitisers providing 25fps (PAL) or 30fps (NTSC) per digitiser, and is expandable to up to 16 inputs by using expansion connectors as seen in the above picture. We will be using one LFG4 card and one expansion connector. When using expansion connectors, the frame rate that the card is able to provide drops dramatically: we are using six inputs, so two of the inputs will run at of 25fps each, and the other four will run at about 2fps each.
It is important to use this card in a computer with PCI-X slots - the PCI slots in older computers are not fast enough and you will not get clean images when using all four inputs at the largest size. There is also a PCIe (PCI Express) version of this card available for newer computers with PCIe slots.
Cost: £500 from Active Silicon. |
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| Computer |
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| A dual-processor 1.8GHz G5 PowerMac was chosen as it is easily able to cope with 6 cameras, with room for expansion in the future if necessary. It has 2GB RAM and a 320GB hard drive, which should provide enough storage space for about three to four weeks' worth of captured video in MPEG-4 format. It also has fast PCI-X slots, which is very important for installing the Active Silicon video input card that we will be using.
Cost: £530 |
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| Power Supplies |
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| It is important to choose high-quality reliable power supplies. This one is 12V regulated (regulated is recommended as it provides a much more stable and noise-free supply than unregulated, minimising the posibility of ripples in the power supply causing noise in the video image).
Cost: £12 each from RF Concepts. |
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| Power Management Device |
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| An Aviosys IPPower9258 will be used to control power to the computer and router. See this
document for more information on this topic.
Cost: £130 |
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| Router / ADSL Modem |
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| A Netgear DG834G was chosen as it is reliable and has all the features we need such as remote administration and port forwarding.
Cost: £54 from dabs.com. |
