Sitting at a computer in a complete creative process or at a game, my faithful dog often distracted me with his bark, I had to tear my fifth point from my favorite chair, go out into the yard and look who was there. It turns out that the postman just walked in and put the press in a box or the children ran noisily past the yard. In general, I was worried in vain. So the idea came to peek over the fence without taking his eyes off the monitor, with one click of the mouse.
For this matter, the webcam is the best suited. Firstly, cheaply, in comparison with other CCTV systems, secondly, no additional equipment needs to be installed. The driver that comes with the camera is a pretty good program that allows you to virtually rotate the camera horizontally and vertically, and even flip the image. You can record a video on your hard drive or take a photo. Also adjustable brightness, contrast and color. Which helps a lot to adjust the image depending on the illumination on the street and the time of day. But in the dark the camera is blind as a mole, but this thing is fixable if you install additional illumination of the viewing area.
The main difficulty was lengthening the camera wire, because I could not buy such a long USB cable. And also in the manufacture of a protective box and the installation of a video camera in the right place.
Let's start with the wire. In order to lengthen the cable, coolly cut it in half, between the camera and the USB plug, remove the protective sheath at both ends of the wire by a couple of centimeters. And we see four veins there, and even in a braid. Hurrah! they are of different colors, already lighter. And that means we need five wires of the desired length. Be sure to carefully measure the distance from the place you plan to install the camera to your computer, you need to try to keep the wire as short as possible.
I don’t know how much the braid screen affects image quality, but I got an extension cord of ten meters, without a screen. I do not observe any extraneous interference and degradation of image quality. It is advisable to take the wires as thin as possible, but always in isolation. Enameled winding for these purposes is not suitable. I found a telephone cable with twenty thin color wires. I had to carefully cut the protective sheath and remove the five necessary wires. It’s good, of course, if the wires are of different colors, but you can also have one-color ... Just in this case, they will need their dialing, so as not to mix anything up.
We lay the cable by passing it into the holes drilled in the walls of your home. And already on our desktop we solder the USB plug with the correspondingly recorded colors and carefully isolate all the soldering spots. You can enable it to check the operability of the loop.
It should be noted that indoors and outdoors there is a big difference in lighting. Therefore, after the first inclusion, it may seem that nothing is working. No need to panic, especially if you are sure that you have not messed up the wires. It is necessary to open the settings in the program and turn the brightness or change the flags. The program was in English, I am not strong in it, so I acted by sticking in, and success came.
When the picture appears, you can move on. The final configuration will be repeated after installing the street webcam in place.
The webcam is designed to work indoors, so be sure to protect it from the weather. You can be smart, but for this I used a piece of a plastic bottle.Maybe this is not aesthetically pleasing, but as the hero Lelik said, but cheap, reliable and practical. For those who decide to follow my path, cut a bottle of 1.5 liters in half, we need a half with a bottom. The design of the protective casing - boxing is clear from the photograph.
Yes, and another major detail is the sun visor. It must be made of opaque material so that direct sunlight does not fall into the camera lens under any circumstances. I used rubber from a car camera. We wrap our camera with a strip of rubber so that a four centimeter peak is formed from the lens, and insert into our bottle. If the camera stand interferes, in the bottle it is allowed to make a cut into this cut, you can skip the cable. Only in the future, you need to install the camera with this cut necessarily down. The camera should be located above the observed object, and the top is tilted with the bottom and the lens down. This will prevent atmospheric precipitation from entering the camera. I have a solid fence, two meters high. The camera is installed at a height of two and a half meters and a half meters away from the gate and 30 cm deep into the yard. After installation, you will need to fine-tune the program again. The picture is certainly not Hollywood, but people are quite recognizable in person.
I have had such a “toy” for two years now, and it has been working in the summer heat, but in our country it is not comic, above 40 C in the shade, especially since the camera hangs in the sunshine and can withstand -20 in winter frosts!
Yuri Yatsenko
