Cameras

As any of you who are regular readers here know, whenever I undertake a major project, I always debate, design, and document the dog doo-doo out of it. (Sorry, I just liked the alliteration in that sentence) Remember the solar project?

I had a cheap camera system in my old house. One of those where you run cables to the cameras and they save to a hard drive in a dedicated DVR. When I moved to this house two and a half years ago, we transitioned to Ring cameras. I regret that decision for the following reasons:

• The cameras send their video to the cloud
• The cloud is just a word meaning “someone else’s computer”
• This means you don’t own the data, and Amazon does all sorts of stuff with it.
• The quality of the pictures is only slightly better than filming with a potato

Even though none of the cameras were inside the house (when we went on vacation, we temporarily put cameras in the house), I still don’t like other people having my data or pictures of my house. Since I installed an entire network worthy of a small office building. Why not use that to increase surveillance?

Infrastructure

For those reasons, I wanted to get a new camera system that overcame these deficiencies. I wanted this system to have:

• 4k video
• Enough storage for 30 days of video retention
• Wired cameras, no wifi

What I decided on:

• Ethernet cameras
• recorded on the Synology RS1221+ that’s my network storage. That server holds 8 HDDs. I have it set up with a pair of RAIDs, one for my data, and one for recording camera video.
• The camera RAID is composed of three 10 TB HDDs giving me about 18TB of storage space
• That 18tb of space is enough for six 4k cameras recording 24/7 for about 60 days
• Software is Surveillance Station, which allows 2 cameras before licenses need to be purchased for more

My plan is to have six cameras covering the property.

1. general surveillance camera covering the front of the house
2. another on the back porch
3. one viewing the back of the house and the pool
4. one that views the kitchen/living room
5. a PTZ camera on the front of the house. This camera will have a 25 or greater optical zoom to allow distance viewing without losing too much resolution.
6. Doorbell camera (this one will have to be WiFi)

Two of the cameras already had Ethernet wires running to them: the one on the back porch went in quickly with no issues. The one covering the front of the house did as well, but even though it was receiving POE power, no connection. I thought it was a faulty cable. It turns out the construction workers who installed the wire got the RJ45 jacks installed wrong. That was quickly taken care of. That gave me two cameras right away.

I went into the attic to run more ethernet cables and discovered that isn’t going to be possible. The header for the wall where the server is just isn’t accessible from up there. I do have an Ethernet cable run to both the front and back of the house that was put there when the house was built. I realized the best way to do this is to use those cables as a trunk that feeds a managed switch. These two switches will allow me to branch those trunk lines into an AP and a camera.

That’s exactly what I did.

This involved expanding my network. My network became a server cabinet that carries most of the Internet, but also required several edge switches to serve other clients. It looks like this:

             Core Switch
                     │
    ┌────────────────┼────────────────┐
    │                │                │
    ▼                ▼                ▼

Entertainment Pool Switch Front Switch

From there, it is easy. Wire the cameras in, and instruct the local (edge) switch to place the camera in the surveillance VLAN, the AP in the management VLAN, etc.

The entire project of Internet and cameras has gotten larger and more expensive than I planned on. I’m going to sit here on just the two cameras until next month, then install the doorbell and pool cameras. The PTZ camera will be last, simply because it’s the most expensive of them. That means I am on sort of a hybrid system at the moment, with two of my own camera and several Ring cameras.

Work in progress.

EDITED TO ADD

In case you haven’t caught on, I try to do a major project each year to improve my position. The first summer we were in this house, we added solar and Powerwalls so we would have backup power. The second summer was the pool, screened in lanai, and hurricane hardening. This summer is a two-fer. One of the projects is the network/camera project, the other is one that makes me far less happy. More on that later.