Coincidence or not. During some HVAC maintenance in my house, the electricity in my back garden has to be cut off. At the end of the day the power is switched on, but the camera isn’t working anymore. Only some IR leds are flashing but the whole camera don’t give a piece of live. Reset to the default settings isn’t working….
The Foscam FI8905W is dead in the w….chair right now. Will look later if it will work again, otherwise I can re-use the houding for another camera.
Time to replace the current cam with a new one. Affordable and it don’t have to be too many megapixels, but at least 1 MP. The old cam was 640×480 without IR-cut filter, so nice purple images during the day. IR leds are a must, a must have is PoE.
The new camera is also a Foscam, type FI9900EP. Advantage of this one is the higher video quality, 2 MP (1920×1080) but more important the Power over Ethernet functionality. Now I can install the camera on every place with an ethernet connection, but without power socket. I got already a PoE injector so, that was an easy choice, but an important one.
Old Foscam FI8905W:
New Foscam FI9900EP:
Much cleaner look, a little bit smaller, but feels more solid than the old one.Even you can connect an external microphone an speaker. If that’s going to work….I don’t know. My experience with another cams with mics and speakers are not that high…both connectors will not be used for now.
This camera will be configured also in Blue Iris, my video surveillance software, which is ofcourse connector to the Home Automation system. Based on IP, port, username and password it’s a piece of cake to add the new camera.
The trigger part will be conpletely handled by BlueIris. The camera settings itself, including mail functionality, etc are disbled. BlueIris can run a script or do a webservice request (tab Alert of camera settings) when motion is triggered. When this is the case, via a webrequest a virtual device in Homeseer is switched on. This virtual device is named at this camera. So I can see also when the last motion is triggered for this camera. Based on the status of this virtual device you can run some event(s).
The other way around is, for example, when the house go in alarm mode, BlueIris will be triggered that all cameras should start continue recording. For this I use the free tool “BICommand.exe”. This executable is copied in the root of the BlueIris program folder and will be called from a .bat file that contains something like:
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Blue Iris 3\bicommand.exe” recstart cam1
In this case, cam1 (shortcutname in BlueIris for a certain camera), will be triggered to start continue recording.
Other commands for BICommand.exe are:
- trigger: triggers an motion event
- recstart: starts manual recording of the camera(s)
- recstop: stops manual recording of the camera(s)
- snapshot: takes a snapshot of the camera(s) and stores it in the recording folder
- reset: resets the camera(s)
- enable: enables the camera(s)
- disable: disables the camera(s)
