VOTE: $500 to upgrade the camera system

Hello all,

I have been promising to upgrade our camera system for a while. And by
"upgrade" I mean "replace" because our current setup has approximately
the resolution of a game boy color and the software sophistication of
drywall. So, in light of our third vehicle break-in in as many years, I
figured it's about a week past time for me to get off my ass and do it.
After some discussion with one of our newest members (whose name I am
once again blanking on) I purchased a $40 IP camera to test and it
appears that it will fulfill all of our requirements. By my count we
will need 10 cameras: Eight to replace our current cameras (3 in the
main room, 1 in the fablab, 2 on the front of the building, 1 on the
dock, 1 in the hallway) and adding two new cameras (in the annex and the
metal room). The lounge will, as always, remain camera free. We already
have more than sufficient file server space to store the video and there
is plenty of free and open source software to manage the cameras so I
will simply be disposing of the dedicated DVR rather than replacing it.
It should cost about $400 for the cameras, I am asking for $500 to have
a bit of wiggle room for any unforeseen additional supplies that might
be needed (likely unnecessary; most of the mounting hardware is included
and we should have plenty of network cables).

Regards,

Ian B.

CTO

Can you link the specific cameras you are looking at? I like this idea but would like more details on what we are getting.

Certainly, here is the specific camera that I ordered for testing. Please note these may not be the cameras we ultimately end up getting, I just wanted to test to make sure this type of camera would work for our purposes. There are quite a few similar cameras available in the same price range with slight variations. For example I was thinking it might be better to go with higher resolution for the outdoor cameras. The beauty of IP cameras is that they don’t all need to be the same, we can mix and match to meet the requirements of each location.

  • Ian B.