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[bkenobi]

I have some property with wooded areas.  I have seen plenty of deer and occasionally a daytime coyote, but I don't really know what's out there when I'm not watching or at night.  I have a trail camera on order to try out, but I was thinking it would be cool to have something feed directly to the network in some way.  I want to add security cameras around the house anyway, so it seems like the two could be solved with a unified solution.

So, what I'm wondering is if anyone knows of a good way to add a day/night camera that is wireless and has a range of say 200yds and can use an external battery.  This may not be feasible since it would really have to be motion controlled to avoid killing the battery.  The only thing I've seen that would work is a 3G enabled trail camera, but that would add a lot of cost to the camera and the data plan could get spendy.  If there was a WiFi version, that might be better.

I'm really just probing to see if anyone else has had a similar thought and could point me in the right direction out of the gate (even if that's to a different forum).

[dhouston]

• http://www.spypoint.com/EN/trail-cameras/WiFi.html

[dave w]

• http://www.spypoint.com/EN/trail-cameras/WiFi.html

Dave, you are one heck of a great resource.

Are you doing any better health wise?

[dhouston]

Dave, you are one heck of a great resource.

I just seem to have a knack for using the right terms with web search engines. 

Are you doing any better health wise?

No, but as long as I avoid the things that most aggravate my spinal cord injury, things aren't too bad. This month I see my cardiologist, lung surgeon, and the VA Spinal Cord Clinic for several annual tests that will tell me more.

[bkenobi]

I'd seen some at cabelas that claimed wireless, but they were all GSM/3G according to the help.  This one looks promising!  I saw one that had a wireless camera and remote base station that could connect to multiple cameras.  I think if that one had the range and could permanently connect to a PC, that might be a nice alternative (they were a bit cheaper per camera but the combination base camera was pricey).

Thanks for the quick response and good luck with those exams!

[bkenobi]

I just realized that the wireless cameras I saw at Cabelas were actually the same brand as you found (Spypoint).  I suppose just finding the full lineup that they offered could have answered my questions.

[dhouston]

Yep! I believe they also have a system with an aggregator (my term, not theirs) which can link multiple GSM/3G cameras with a WiFi network.

[bkenobi]

Reading the documentation an the setup leads me to believe that they require a paid account in order to upload images to their service.  It appears they have a similar setup to LaCross (weather station gateway).  If the device connects to my WiFi, why should I have to pay for their service rather than just storing locally. Sigh...

[dhouston]

That's too bad. I only looked at the specs - I did not dig deeper. There seems to be more and more of this type of thing (e.g. AHP connecting to X10 servers). I had two NAS units fail after power outages despite being powered from a UPS. Both used proprietary formatting schemes so the only way to recover the files was to ransom them which was beyond my means.

[mike]

a possible issue with using a trail camera as a security camera is the time delay BEFORE taking pictures....  I have 8 of em (4 different brands) around a few hundred acres, and they are great for candid shots of those deer & cayotes, but miss most people and cars going past them. They wait until infrared detects something for 10-30 seconds before taking the first snapshot.....

[bkenobi]

I bought a camera off eBay to play with since the price was cheap.  It claims 1 second before it takes a picture, up to 6 pictures per second in that burst, and variable delay between 10 and 60 seconds for next trigger.  I'm going to install it today and see what it comes up with this week.