$1 Billion DIY Video Surveillance Camera Market

These guys are predicting a $1 Billion market for DIY network cameras by 2012. That works out to about 10 million cameras per year, if you assume the cameras cost about $100 each.

Gosh, sure would be nice if someone built a cloud based service that would leverage all those cameras. Wait, that's what sensr.net is about.

Got a network camera? Try sensr.net. We provide sharing, archiving, and alerting for your network camera. We support almost any brand of network camera. As long as the camera has FTP, it will work with our cloud based service.

Configuring the Cisco WVC80N on Sensr

I recently found the Cisco WVC80N for sale at Best Buy. I was visiting my relatives in the Midwest and hoping to buy a camera that I could configure for them with sensr.net. To use network cameras with Sensr, you need one that supports FTP. I was disappointed to find that FTP was not listed on the side of the box. Since this was the only network camera they had, and the store was closing in 10 minutes, I did a quick search from my iPhone and found this FAQ, indicating that indeed the camera will support FTP.

I went ahead and bought the camera. It was a bit pricey at $150 but I figured that if it didn't work, I could return it the next day. Best Buy has a pretty decent return policy. In this case that worked in their favor, as I'm sure it does many times.

As with many of these network cameras, the setup software only works on Windows. If you have a Mac or Linux, you'll have to forgo the software install, which in my opinion is probably a good thing. There is no reason you should need to install software on your PC to setup or use a network camera.

So a couple of things I learned. First, by default, the camera will grab an IP address over the ethernet using DHCP. This is pretty standard. The trick with these cameras is to find the IP address that your router gives out. The above mentioned FAQ also says the default IP is 192.168.1.100. This is NOT the case if your network has DHCP, which is probably the case. I found the IP address by looking at the clients table on the home network's router.

The second thing I learned was that the camera doesn't support timed FTP. This means you can't simply have the camera FTP images every second, which is the way I like to setup cameras on sensr.net. As a work around, I turned on Motion Detection for the camera and told it to FTP the images to sensr.net. I then set the motion detection level as sensitive as possible. Unfortunately to set the overall sensitivity, you need to use Internet Explorer, since that configuration is set using an Active X control. Yuck!

The advantage of having Sensr, rather than the camera, do the motion detection, is that the live views are much more interesting. If your camera only sends images to Sensr when there is motion, the Live Preview links from the sensr.net site won't be very interesting.

Sensr does support camera based motion detection. Basically this means motion detection on the sensr.net site is turned off, and we'll assume every image coming from your camera should be saved. (We still have limits on the number of images we'll save, currently 600 per hour.)

Overall I would not recommend the WVC80N. My main gripes are:

• Lack of timed FTP uploads
• Active X is required for the web configuration
• Too expensive

You would be better off buying the Dlink DCS-920 which works well with Sensr and is considerably cheaper.

Barbie Cam

Looks like you can now get Barbie with a built in camera. The camera isn't connected to the net and it only stores about 30 minutes of web quality video. This means we don't support it on sensr.net.

There is a USB connector so maybe you can hack it to be a live webcam, which we do support. :-)

Can't FTP from IP Camera

At sensr.net we provide free FTP logins for people with network cameras. A common problem is that IP cameras, like the DCS-920, can't always do DNS. This means that the camera can have problems reaching our servers, say f3.sensr.net, since it can't find the IP address for the FTP server.

The best way to fix this is to set a DNS server in your camera's network settings page. You can either dig out the DNS settings for your ISP, or you can simply use 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. These servers are the DNS servers from OpenDNS, another favorite startup of mine.

Eventually we'll have better realtime support to help you debug your FTP server settings. In the meantime, check those DNS server settings!

Wow, 10 years of beguelin.com

Back in 2000 I registered the domain name beguelin.com for 10 years. It expired this month and I had to renew it again. Network Solutions sent me a letter in the mail since the old Yahoo email address they had on file for me didn't work anymore.

A lot has changed in the last 10 years. It almost hurts my brain to think about it. In fact most of it is so personal, I don't feel right blogging about it.

I do remember getting a call back in 2000 from the folks at Henry Beguelin, they wanted to buy the domain. Frankly, I might have been willing to sell it to them. I told them to make me an offer, but they decided to go with henrybeguelin.com instead. I still haven't gotten around to buying a pair of Henry Beguelin shoes. It would be nice to have a pair.

The domain renewal went through, even though I accidentally let it expire. Email that was stuck in limbo has started coming through and the blog is back online. Apparently all is well in domain registration land.

I decided to renew the domain for 20 years this time. I can't even imagine what I'll be blogging about in 2030. Maybe I'll be concerned about social security. Either that or where to park my nuclear powered flying electric car.

sensr.net now supporting kyivstar sms

At sensr.net we received a request from one of our Ukrainian users asking us to support SMS for his local phone carrier. Luckily we're using a package called sms-fu that makes adding carriers very easy.

Our sms_fu.yml file now has these additional lines, which means our users can select the appropriate Kyivstar email to SMS gateway.

kyivstar-contract:
 name: Kyivstar (contract)
 value: @sms.kyivstar.net
kyivstar-prepaid:
 name: Kyivstar (prepaid)
 value: @2sms.kyivstar.net

Of course nothing is as simple as you might expect. We were checking numbers on the user's settings page to make sure the number was legit. Unfortunately, the site was enforcing a US centric format, 212-555-1234. I tried to add a Ukrainian format number and our site rejected it. After changing the model verifier to be more liberal, we then ran our unit tests and found that a few of them failed. We then modified the tests to match the new more liberal phone number format and all is well.

Give sensr.net a try. You can use us to archive, alert, and share your network cameras. Now even from the Ukraine!

Quicktime Screen Recording

Quicktime (version 10.0) on Snow Leopard makes it crazy easy to create screencasts. I was playing with the experimental DVR view on sensr.net this morning and thought it would be cool to be able to screencast it.

If you have a Mac running Snow Leopard (aka 10.6), just run Quicktime and select New Screen Recording from the menu. It will even directly upload the video to YouTube for you.

Here's the screencast I made. It shows the DVR view. You can select a time period and then play all the images from that time period. Go to sensr.net and try it out for yourself. More on sensr.net later.