Smart Home Blog

Mobotix has a brand new intelligent IP camera in the form of the M22 that can survive even under the most extreme of industrial environments such as mining and manufacturing. The M22 is capable of providing clear indoor and outdoor as well as day and night visualization without missing a beat. Additional features include a 4x digital zoom, video frame rates of up to 30fps in VGA resolution, and full 802.3af Power over Ethernet standard. You can install the M22 to support either security or process monitoring applications. A built-in microphone and speakers round off the list of specifications, enabling you to achieve audio functionalities like VoIP and SIP telephony with video.

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Australian company Swann offers the cool way to make surveillance - Digital Private Eye. Basically it’s a small video camera placed in a case which looks like an alarm passive infra-red device. So, nobody knows that everything under your control.

The camera comes with a built-in motion detector that starts taking shots each time it is triggered, storing up to 30,000 images on a single 1GB SD card. It can be powered by a 9V battery or a power cable for 24-hour surveillance. You can view camera’s shapshots by connecting it in USB port of your PC or read them directly from SD card. The Digital Private Eye may use mostly as stand alone spy recorder and not as part of real time surveillance system. You can be a lucky owner of this spycam just for $199.00.

[via Ubergizmo]

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I came across this Skype hack which turns your PC with webcam and Skype account into surveillance system. Sure if somebody asked about this functionality this means it’s useful. But IMHO it’d much better to use simple IP camera for this purpose. IP camera is more expensive than webcam but it doesn’t need PC to work. Usually, IP camera already includes web server with user interface. So, it needs just an Internet connection.
For example D-Link IP camera (just about $100) exists in two variants: wired and wireless. It allows to monitor your home/office without PC. You have to connect the camera to LAN and configure it via web interface. The camera has built-in web server with web interface and motion detector. It may record video and send notifications via email if some motion will be detected. And so on.

But anyway, if you like Skype you can use it to monitor your home.

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Smarthome.com offers a solar powered color wireless outdoor camera. The camera has built-in motion detector. So it transmits images and voices only if it’s needed. The good feature of this camera is a solar battery:

The 2.4GHz Solar Color PIR Camera’s solar panel uses the sun’s rays to run and maintain a charge to the camera battery during daylight hours. A negligible amount of energy is released by the long-life rechargeable battery to operate the camera at night. While the camera will work after sunset, it requires a minimum light of 3 Lux to capture images.

Cyprus is the good place to use this camera. Here is a lot of sunny days!

The price of Solar Color PIR Camera is just $159.99.

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Many people were in the situation when they came to their cars and found out some damages. It’s difficult or maybe impossible to find a witness and get a compensation. The British company TruScene offers an elegant solution - The TruScene TS-1L camera. The camera should be mounted internally on the front windscreen (there is also an option to purchase a rear mounted camera for fitting to the rear screen). If the car is involved in an accident that results in a pre-determined g-force, then a g-force motion sensor is activated and the video image is transferred to non-volatile memory for storage. The camera can be easyly connected to the PC to download video.

Additionally, the camera has built-in LCD display for adjastment and integraded GPS to allow for the location of the footage to be embedded onto the clip as well as the time.

Hovewer, the price is not so cheap - $1,000. But it depends on your car.

[via Engadget]

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