I have a customer who has an office with five rooms. He would like me to in stall a video camera at the front door and then be able to see who walks in to the office lobby on his computer. The individual rooms' computers are no t networked but he does have WIFI. He says he thinks that there is a way to put the video signal over the WIFI so that everyone in the office with a c omputer who is logged on to that WIFI will be able to see the camera signal on their computer. Is there a way to do this? Thanks, Lenny
The video is going to saturate the wi-fi to the point where the wi-fi will be useless. Even one camera belching uncompressed video will do that. The only way you're going to get it installed without complaints is to run the necessary wires. You might be able to do it using a dual band router, with the cameras on one band, and the users on the other, but even that is problematic due to interference from other offices. My worse wi-fi systems are in glass wall buildings, looking out over the city or at other glass wall buildings, and seeing hundreds of wi-fi routers.
If you want to do it cheaply, there are kits of cameras and camera server available. I kinda like Swann: because they're commonly available and cheap. Not the best, not great, just available and cheap. Since this is a repair newsgroup, I suggest you buy a replacement fan for the camera server in advance. It will blow in about 6 months, and continue to blow every 6 months.
For running wires, I use CAT5, not coax cable. One pair for video, one pair for power, and 2 cameras per cable. About
150 ft maximum.
However, if you want to actually identify someone on the video, forget about composite video cameras. They're too fuzzy and lack resolution. For that, you'll need an IP camera. CAT5 wiring, with one camera per cable.
If all the networked PC's need to view the video, you will find that the composite video camera servers allow exactly one connection per user. There are various ways to get the camera monitor image onto a PC via the network, none of which are stock and all of which are messy. I don't want to go there now.
Besides clarity, the other advantage of IP cameras is that network users can login to the camera directly. There's usually an ugly and buggy ActiveX control, that only works with Internet Exploder, for logging into and controlling a camera from a PC. That will give you the local viewing. Most IP cameras allow more than one user to login. I don't recall if there's an upper limit. However, if you want one person to view more than one camera at a time, or worse, control more than one camera at a time, then you'll need an IP camera server and a PC. With a camera server, anyone on the network that connects to the camera server can see (and control) all the cameras.
Hint: Don't use wi-fi for devices that don't move.
Good luck.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
That mey be true, but he doesn't need a camera belching uncompressed video. I use IP cameras from Panasonic (higher quality but expensive) and Foscam (inexpensive but some firmware bugs to work around). For the need the OP is describing, he can have the camera send one jpeg snapshot per second so wi-fi has plenty of bandwidth even if all five users are watching. And, no controller is needed.
But CAT5 wiring is sometimes impossible to run without a major hassle. Wi-fi will work.
I disagree. Wire is best, but wi-fi works for hard to reach places whether they move or not.
Well, the OP mumbled something about having 5 rooms. Presumably that means 5 computahs monitoring the video. I don't know of any camera that can do multicast, so the JPEG every 1 second becomes a JPG every
200 msec. 640 x 480 will suffice, but I have some cameras that are doing 1024 x 768. Grinding the file size with: the 640x480 will be about 200 KBytes or 1.6Mbits. Send 5 of those (one per computah) over the LAN and you use 8 mbits/sec of bandwidth. That will saturate a 10baseT connection, so presumably the office is using 100baseT or 1000baseT. For wireless, the best you can do with ordinary 802.11g is 25 mbits/sec thruput. Spectacular claims of
802.11n performance tend to be science fiction as I've noticed that in the presence of interference, most office wireless lans end up settling down to about 12 mbits/sec thruput. (Connection speed is about twice the throughput). So for wireless, the 8 mbits/sec of camera traffic will suck about 2/3 of the available wireless bandwidth (because only one wi-fi transmitter can be on at a time).
As I mumbled, IP cameras will allow multiple connections, but if there are more than one camera, it's rather tricky for a given PC to view more than one camera at a time. My crystal ball sees more than one camera as NONE of the installs that I've done every stopped at one camera.
I have yet to see an "impossible" cable run. Expensive, messy, and awkward, are all common, but not impossible. One client absolutely insisted that his landlord would have a fit if he modified his offices in any way. I always present the landlord with a copy of the work order and the building permit application, but that didn't seem to help. When a tenant moves out, the wiring becomes the landlords problem, so I want him involved. I've only been turned down once. However, this customer kept insisting it was "impossible". When he wasn't looking, I ran flat ethernet cable under the carpeting. He just went on to obstruct me in other ways.
I haven't had to run anything through the sewers, drains, air plenums, or water pipes, but if necessary, those are also possible. More commonly, I use powerline networking (HomePlug), phone line networking (HomePNA), or ethernet over CATV coax (MoCA). MoCA is quite fast and reliable, but not cheap.
Think of airtime (the amount of time your trashmitter is on the air) as being a valuable resource. With wi-fi, only one transmitter can be belching RF at a time. Using wi-fi to connect laptops, tablets, PDA's, smartphones, game pads, and such make sense because they need to be used almost anywhere. However, devices that are continuously passing traffic, like TIVO, Roku, and security cameras, are simply wastes of airtime. Since they spew data continuously, there's no airtime left for other users with laptops etc. Things that don't need to be wireless, should not be connected via wireless.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
install a video camera at the front door and then be able to see who walks into the office lobby on his computer. The individual rooms' computers are not networked but he does have WIFI. He says he thinks that there is a way to put the video signal over the WIFI so that everyone in the office with a computer who is logged on to that WIFI will be able to see the camera sign al on their computer. Is there a way to do this? Thanks, Lenny
There will only be one camera and I misspoke about the rooms. Yes there are five but it will most likely be viewed in just two, or perhaps three. Can I hard wire the cameras to each room and then somehow hard wire into the in dividual computers? Lenny
Why complicate things? Video monitors are cheap and can be looped, or you could use a modulator and some old NTSC TV sets for monitors. Converting analog video to digital uses up computer's resources. What are people supposed to do, work or watch the video?
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Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.
A friend wants to wire his home for cameras. The front door is the most troublesome: inside the door is the living room, high ceilings and windows running almost the full height.
How does one get power (and if using wired cameras, data) to/from a camera?
I told him it would require significant ripping up of the sheetrock (textured, of course) and re-doing it all after the install. He isn't tempted.
Any suggestions how to do this that isn't so messy?
I keep a few pieces of different types of plastic and metal wiremold in the car to show customers. Most of the stuff came from jobs where I had to rip the stuff out at the customers request.
None of my customers have ever approved using wiremold. The problem was that they don't want to look at it. For long runs, it had to go run horizontally along the wall near the floor. That worked fine until it runs into a doorway. If I was lucky, and they had a hollow door tread, so I could continue the run (ignoring the awkward transition around the door frame molding). If not, I was stuck.
I did use surface conduit once when I installed a structured wiring system. That's where all the communications cables arrive in a single neat bundle. Same with cube farms, where individual desks tended to be isolated "islands" with no adjacent walls. However, none of the surface wiring was ever wrapped around a doorway.
If desperate, you could run the CAT5 on the outside of the building. However, that only works with single wall construction. I'm not very proud of this mess, but it was the only way it could be done.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Whenever possible, i ran it to a corner of the room, then into the ceiling. I have also removed wood trim along a ceiling and hid wire under it. I used to do a lot of work in schools and offices. I would give two quotes, completely hidden, or Wiremold. Sometimes a third option was to let their maintenance men pull the wire, as long as the customer signed off that they were responsible for any damaged materials. I had real fun moving a school intercom console at one school. The school board had moved their offices to the high school, and took over the main office. 15 years later, they built a new office and wanted the main office returned to where it belonged. Unfortunately, they had added a dozen classrooms between moves, and there were two, three foot thick foundations separating the two parts. Luckily, I found an abandoned 16 pair '1A1' phone cable between the two rooms and managed to find a dozen pairs that were still usable.
Thick baseboards can be pulled, and then saw a notch off the back with a table saw. I had real fun about 15 years ago. I had to run a 25 pair cable into a new studio at a radio station. The entire building was cement blocks, and the only way to route the wire was to enlarge existing holes, with cables already filling them. The station manager told me it was impossible. He freaked the next day when he came in and the work was done. then he wanted to know how I cut square holes around the wires without cutting the existing cables. ;-)
Good old 'Telepoles'?
I have never done a job that looked that bad. Even for a temporary install.
I hate to run anything outside, without putting it in conduit and preferably underground.
He could use a wireless camera with multiple receivers, but that's still susceptible to causing and dealing with interference. It could even let a crook see exactly where the cameras are aimed, long before entering the building.
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Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.
That works if the object of the exercise was to the wire into the suspended ceiling (for an office) of the attic (for a home). If the rafters are sitting on top of the stud wall, access is difficult for going through the wall, so surface conduit is probably a good solution. The problem is that none of my customers want to see the CAT5 cable running up the wall. Hiding it behind molding seems to only be acceptable for baseboard molding. I've milled the back of corner and baseboard molding for running wires, but that looks awful on top of a textured dry wall. It's also a problem with walls that are not quite square or true. Nobody notices until I run something straight up the wall. Then, everything looks angled or serpentine.
I don't have a good feel for the relative cost of going through the wall versus surface molding. It's been a long time since I've done it. My guess(tm) is that going through the wall with wire is about
50% more expensive than surface molding, and structured wiring, about twice as expensive.
In my office phone and utility room, I recently ripped out a small pickup truck load of 25 pair cable from the phone room. Every time someone would move into the office, the phone crew would add cable instead of figuring out how to use the existing cable. There's still about 2-3 more pickup truck loads "stored" in the ceiling. This is after the cleanup (I'm not done). The Type 66 punch down blocks were fully populated with two Merlin phone controllers and expanders.
That solves a non-problem. Horizontal runs, along walls and between doors are not a problem. It's getting around doors that's a problem.
Incidentally I like to rip out the lower 2-3 inches of the drywall and baseboard, and use plastic baseboard raceway conduit. I've only done one such job and it was slick and easy. They didn't have this stuff when I was doing it, so we made our own out of repurposed vinyl shapes: However, it still leaves the problem of getting around the doors.
Incidentally, I've also run fiber optic cables through walls, which has the advantage of being slightly smaller than CAT5 cable: The downside is the cost of the media converters and my batting average at terminating the ends.
I'll pretend to forget about spending a weekend pounding on a concrete filled reinforced concrete block wall with a star drill (after destroying TWO Skil hammer drills). I slit lengthwise a piece of EMT scrap conduit to cover the existing cable, and pounded a hole next to the existing cable hold. I was lucky and missed the rebar.
What's a telepole?
This was vinyl molding on top of the carpet, where everyone walking by can trip over it. I bought a roll and found myself replacing several high traffic lengths about every 6 months. The metal versions last longer, but were much more expensive.
After the wiring was done, someone accidentally discovered that the floor mounted power receptacles included an adjacent low voltage conduit raceway that would have been perfect for running ethernet and phone. The original carpet crew simply covered over the access covers leaving only the AC power receptacles exposed. Grrrr...
Long story and I'll spare you the details. I was several months out of surgery for a heart bypass. I didn't want to do the wiring, didn't really feel up to doing the wiring, but was stuck with doing it if I wanted the computer networking part of the job. The owner didn't care what it looked like as long as it was cheap. I didn't do the actual wiring, so there are some oddities, such as the lack of squared corners, lack of supporting cable clamps, and bad choice of colors. Like I said, I'm not very proud of that mess.
I wanted to do outside conduit, but the cost was prohibitive. Note that this was an old Victorian single wall style structure, with existing outside plumbing and wiring. Adding some CAT5 didn't seem like much a problem.
If he used a wireless IP camera, he might barely be able to coexist with existing wi-fi systems. If he used an analog wireless TV camera, it would obliterate any wi-fi within range because it's on the air
100% of the time and leaves absolutely no airtime for the wireless.
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
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