ACTi Webcam
I recently found this affordable Exterior Webcam from ACTi. It’s a great way for projects to track progress without breaking the bank. I selected this camera because of it’s good image quality 1280×720. You wouldn’t want to use this image for the front cover of a magazine but its good enough for project updates and progress tracking. Anyway, many of the cameras in this price range had smaller images sizes. The other selling point for me was it’s weatherproof rating of IP66. If you’re like me you may be wonder what IP66 means. Basically it means that No Dust and No Water can penetrate the camera. For more interesting information on IP ratings check out Yahoo Answers. Here in Colorado this spring has been one of the rainiest in years and the camera has preformed like a champ. The camera is also rated to withstand temperatures down to -4 degree Fahrenheit which will be tested later this winter. The camera can be powered over ethernet (PoE), note that an additional power injector may be needed depending on your network. I ended up mounting the camera to the jobsite trailer and plugging it in to a 120V outlet and then ran ethernet to the camera. The only drawback with this camera is that it doesn’t have a pan/tilt function but for capturing time-lapse progress from a stationary point it works very well. The ACTi software that controls the camera are not bad, however it could have a more friendly interface, like most technical things. Their tech support is good if you have questions. For easy installation I suggest mounting it to a job site trailer making it easy to provide power and data to the camera. Keep it simple.
As discussed in our Webcam Tool Post, JobSiteVisitor.com has developed a website integration that allows users to integrate a project webcam into our service. Basically Photos are sent to us on a regular basis and we display the most current image from the camera. Then each day at the same time we save an image for your Webcam Time-Lapse Viewer. It’s an easy way to track progress. For more information on integrating webcams into JobSiteVisitor.com drop me an email.
I would be leaving out an important part of the story if I didn’t mention how I attempted a solar/wireless installation of this camera. Unfortunately I was unable to to power the camera and wireless bridge for more than 5-days. Anyway, I’m still working on developing an affordable solar/wireless webcam installation that I will share with all of you just as soon as I figure it out. If you have any thoughts or tips on solar wireless webcams I would love to hear about them.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.