Low Cost Surveillance Kit for Outdoor Use

Prologue

In 2012, I changed the apartment to the house. The reasons were purely economic - in the Russian Federation it is cheaper to live in your home. In most economically developed countries, it is cheaper to live in an apartment, and in our house it is such specificity. However, the article is not about that.
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After moving to the house, I repeatedly had the need to control the nearby space for a host of reasons - starting with individual unscrupulous neighbors, ending with stray hooligans and gypsies. In the first year I managed to buy a car DVR.

Modelka Agestar DVR-188 proved to be generally not bad, but there were a lot of restrictions. The recording was carried out on 2 SD flash drives in 32 GB and in the afternoon we had to change their places, since Recording was made in 1280x960 mode, and the more economical 640 * 480 mode was dirtied when encoding a video by the recorder itself and small details were disgustingly displayed. When the external power supply was disconnected, the DVR shut down, although it had a built-in battery that allowed it to function offline for up to 2 hours, it was probably a software bug. Also at night the camera was blind, because it was standing on the inside of the window and turning on the backlight system led to reflection from the glass and nothing else was visible except the glass. Toward the fall, another unpleasant effect began to manifest itself - the windows in the house were periodically fogged up and the DVR again showed only the surface of the window, even in the daytime.

In general, the idea to put a full-fledged surveillance system suggested itself. Stopped mostly prices.

Reflections

Since buying a car DVR, I had a lot of time to think. I studied the topic, read the available articles, including on HB and GT. In order to save money, I even tried to assemble a surveillance system on the DIR-320 with a USB camera and OpenWRT firmware connected to the USB. Some results were achieved, but the problem with placing the camera outside the house, where there are low, and negative periods, temperatures for six of the twelve months, was not solved. For this reason, I finally came to the idea of ​​buying a ready kit of video surveillance.

Having weighed the options between analog and digital cameras, I stopped at analog. The reason is again economic - the cost of an analog camera is 2.5-3 times cheaper than the same in terms of the characteristics of an IP camera. In general, it makes sense to put IP cameras only for the purpose of improving image quality, however, cameras supporting HD (typically 1280 * 720) are even more expensive. Of course it is nice to be able to see the number of the car from afar or something else small, but the cost of it is unnecessarily high for an ordinary person.

Purchase

Looking at the galloping exchange rate of the ruble, regarding the two “reference” currencies, I did not have much choice and it remained to catch profitable offers among sellers. And one day, looking through the Yulmart catalog, I saw a not quite intelligible sentence with the text “Falcon Eye FE-004H video surveillance / video kit“ Giving 500Gb ”. There were no particulars, there was only one photo with a recorder, four cameras and four cables. Turning to an online consultant received data that is not exactly known, but it seems like the power supply and hard drive are included. When I saw in the catalog for the first time, the number of sets for sale was 12 pieces, when I looked at the next day, then there were already 6 pieces. I took a chance and ordered, and the next day there was only one set left. Perhaps these were old stocks, somehow randomly coming up for sale, but before the order I was confused by the price of 10,800 wooden, while all other offers (not only from this company, but also other sellers in the network) showed prices of 14 kilo rubles. and higher.

The order was delivered a day earlier than promised. Officially, the kit is called Falcon Eye FE-004H-KIT (if you believe what is written on the box) and this is what was in the composition:

• Falcon Eye FE-004H recorder (with 500GB hard disk) - 1 pc.
• Falcon Eye FE-I80C / 15M analog video cameras - 4 pcs.
• Cables for video cameras, 18 m long - 4 pcs.
• Power supply - output 12B, 5A - 1 pc.
• Adapter cord for powering from one power supply unit to 5 devices (recorder + cameras) - 1 pc.
• Infrared remote control with a pair of "mizinchikovyh" AAA batteries - 1 pc.
• A small USB mouse, the well-known Chinese company NoName - 1 pc.

Data on the registrar can be viewed on the Falcon Eye FE-004H manufacturer’s website , there is also information on the Falcon Eye FE-I80C / 15M camera, but this is not exactly the configuration I have on the manufacturer’s website. Perhaps it was before, and then the data was deleted, although the deletion logic is not clear - you can simply add something that is discontinued.

Registrar Falcon Eye FE-004H

Front Panel:


Rear connectors:


As a person is a very curious creature, and I am not an exception, the first thing I did was to open the recorder to make sure that there was a hard disk inside, as I was in vague doubts, and there was no hard disk on the packing box.



As you can see - everything is fair and the hard drive is present.


Having unscrewed the hard drive and hooked it through the USB adapter to the laptop with the ALT Linux Centaurus, I found out that the file system is Ext3 there and the hard disk itself does not support SMART. This somewhat unpleasantly surprised me - all modern drives have SMART. However, as an option, I guess That this is a special order for DVRs in order to reduce costs. Registrar firmware seems to be unable to work with SMART.

The device board, relative to the case, is quite small and there is plenty of free space inside the case.



Also, just in case, I took a photo of all the microcircuits installed on the recorder, except for one, since there is a radiator on the glue.



Camera Falcon Eye FE-I80C / 15M

I did not disassemble the Falcon Eye FE-I80C / 15M analog camera, since until you want to lose the warranty. For this reason, there will be only external pictures.



A mounting bracket comes with the camera, and there are two mounting holes on the camera itself, which allows the camera to be fixed in any desired position.





For night illumination, the camera contains a bunch of LEDs.



LEDs emit not only infrared light, but also a little in the visible red range, for this reason the camera can be visually detected by a potential intruder at night. In general, although the red glow is very weak, but it is.

Software

I will not describe the built-in shell options, since everything is clear enough there. In addition, the manual is attached as a book, and on the disk. If you want to explore, you can download the manufacturer's website . The difference in the appearance of the recorder can not be ignored. The software itself may also differ in appearance, but all the difference boils down to a different color scheme.

I want to note an unpleasant feature when working through the network - the live image is higher than the CIF (352x288) in the network is not issued. Although the disk is quite a save in D1 format (704x576). In the view mode, the video already saved on the hard disk displays in D1 format (704x576). Perhaps the reasons for a weak gland, and maybe it's just an artificial limitation of firmware.

On the disc itself, the image is saved in some kind of its own format. The files have the ending * .h264 and are not opened by any player available to me. To play them there is a special program for Windows, on the disk with the manual. Also on the same disk there is a utility that converts h264 files to AVI format, which is also designed for Windows. Moreover, it recodes much faster than the registrar does.

The embedded system itself can save files in the AVI format (AVC codec), but does it very slowly. At least a flash drive file size of 185 MB and a duration of 15 minutes, saved for 8 minutes. A file with the same contents and approximately the same size in the native h264 format was saved for 4 minutes. There may be a problem with the speed of the USB controller built into the recorder, since The flash drive itself works an order of magnitude faster, being stuck into a laptop.

Also support is declared: Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry, MacOS - client software is on both the disk and the site, but I did not check these options.

Video examples

Honestly I warn you that the video recorded during the day is not mine:



But my video shot at night.



Subjectively stated 15 m, for outdoor use, the backlight does not fully provide. Good visibility can be expected within 10 meters. Although this is also not bad for a budget solution.