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Comment by TCLynx on February 11, 2011 at 7:38am

After several days back and forth with tech support I did finally get the e-mail working as well as getting the camera to get it's time from the internet.  Apparently if you set the time to manual or sync with computer, it will set the time but anything that re-boots the camera or fluctuates power will cause the camera to go back to the factory default day/time in 2007 and it requires some one manually going in and telling it to re-sync to fix it. 

The resolution on the camera isn't great but probably as good as most sub $100 IP cameras.

 

Hopefully I'll be able to do all the same stuff with the CCTV system.

Comment by John R on February 10, 2011 at 10:24pm

I don't think IP cameras are a cheat but they used to be ridiculously expensive some years ago. I'm sure they'll continue to get cheaper.  Did you get the email to work?  That can be problematic.  Outgoing old school email is the only port my ISP blocks.  Once I set up authenticated email it worked fine.  If your IP camera didn't require you to enter the username and password for your internet provider account then it isn't authenticated email.  How does your regular email work at that site?

 

I saw on your website that you plan to use the camera for time lapse images of your growbeds.  I thought this was a great idea too and is really the only reason I added a camera to my system.  The problem I ran into was that the video camera I was using is pretty limited in resolution and has a horrible glare problem.  I plan to replace that with a 2 to 4 megapixel digital camera connected to the computer with a usb cable.  Linux systems can use a program called gphoto2 to automatically acquire images from a select group of digital cameras.  The nice thing is that many of these are available used at a decent price from places like Amazon.

 

Comment by TCLynx on February 6, 2011 at 1:22pm

The camera I used for this one is kinda a cheat I guess.  It is an IP camera so I just needed to set it up and hook it to the router.  Yea, I should go about trying to write up a blog post about how that all went.  I still haven't gotten it to send e-mails  I can't figure out if the camera just isn't doing it properly or if I have the settings wrong but I send e-mail all day and don't seem to have a problem with it.

 

Comment by John R on February 6, 2011 at 12:39pm

Glad to see someone is getting something accomplished.  Are you going to write up what you used to accomplish the video feed?  I'm sure others would like to know.  The picture quality is much better than I get from my old X10 video camera.  I get a massive amount of glare whenever the sun is out.

 

The only thing tangible I've gotten done is an optically isolated rs-485 communications interface.  Not as fast as I would like but it looks reliable so far.

Comment by TCLynx on February 6, 2011 at 10:39am

Well I've started my remote monitoring endeavors with Duck TV

Aquaponic Lynx Live Garden Cameras

DUCK TV is the only one I have running so far but hoping to have more soon.

Comment by Rectorcain on February 6, 2011 at 9:40am

Hello all, just joined here and wanted to say hi from the northern mountains of Arizona. I am just about done with construction on my aquaponic greenhouse and am looking forward to connecting with those of you who share the passion of aquaponics. I welcome any and all input so feel free to comment. I will be posting pic's and info soon.

Comment by TCLynx on January 25, 2011 at 9:00am

For the really low level beginners looking to learn a bit about electronics while creating possibly useful thing, the picaxe forum is quite handy.  I built myself a handy little repeat cycle timer and one can see the diagrams for it there.  TCLynx Timer thread

and I expand on the timer by adding a temperature control relay as well (though I haven't built that quite yet.

 

Now these are very simple little control items.  As to the remote monitoring, I'm starting to teach myself the options with some web cams but those who know more about this than I can please step in since I'm only muddling through here.

 

I hope to hook up some web cams as well as a weather station to an old computer and make it acessable at least to myself on the web so I can check on things while I'm away and at least be able to call some one and send em over to check specific things if I see something wrong.

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