Inexpensive video surveillance for a summer house with your own hands

  • Jul 01, 2022
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My 4-camera video surveillance system, assembled mainly from components from Aliexpress, has been working flawlessly for three years now.
I'll tell you what its capabilities are, what it consists of, and how to make the same.

Inexpensive video surveillance for a summer house with your own hands

All components of the system are outdoors, and they have survived three winters without any problems.

IP-cameras in sealed metal cases are placed on the fences. I chose the "dome" hulls, as they are less visible, do not freeze and their position does not get lost from adhering snow. Next to the cameras are IP54 boxes in which the connections are made.

Inexpensive video surveillance for a summer house with your own hands

A video recorder (NVR), a router, a 3G modem and an uninterruptible power supply are placed in an IP55 metal cabinet.

All cables are outdoor in black insulation.

Capabilities

The main purpose of my video surveillance system is the ability to see that everything is in order in the country, being in the city. I did not set the task of protecting against intruders (if such a task is worth it, it is better to hide the cabinet with equipment in a barn or house, and place some of the cameras so that they cannot be reached without a ladder). Nevertheless, motion recording is carried out, and in case of unforeseen situations, it can help, unless, of course, attackers damage or steal the registrar.

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Cameras and recorder work through the XMEYE cloud. The picture from any camera can be viewed through the application of the same name on the smartphone. Recordings made by motion are also available there (a 32 GB flash drive is enough for 10 days of recording from four cameras).

The image quality of the cameras is very decent.

At night, the cameras automatically turn on infrared illumination and switch to black and white mode.

Food

To power the cameras, the recorder and the router, an AXI-DC30 uninterruptible power supply unit with lead battery 12V 7Ah. It provides 12-14 volts and keeps the system running for several hours when turned off. electricity.

Power is supplied to the cameras via unused pairs of the cable (data goes through the orange and green pairs, minus power is connected to both wires of the brown pair, plus to both wires of the blue pair).

Cables and switching

I used the cheapest outdoor cable with copper-clad aluminum cores. The voltage loss on a long cable is quite large - only 9 volts reach the farthest camera (cable about 50 meters) in night mode, but everything works fine.

To simplify and reduce the cost of the design, I did not use adapters - power injectors. For each cable, only the orange and green pair are crimped into the RJ45 connectors, and the blue and brown pair are connected from the camera side to the power connector "for screws", and in the cabinet - to the Wago 222 connectors. Cables with connectors for the registrar and the router are also connected to them.

Internet

I use a cheap 3G modem with Avito connected to an old Keenetic 4G router from the same place. Simka - MGTS "Smart for Your Own" (such SIM cards are offered to those who are trying to turn off the landline phone in Moscow, while the Internet and landline phone charges are only 230 rubles). The tariff of this SIM card is excessive for video surveillance - it only needs about 0.1 GB per month (traffic is consumed only when you watch video from cameras or recordings in the application). 3G speeds for video surveillance is enough.

The modem is placed in a jar from Actimel, sticking out of the cabinet from the bottom, so that the metal of the cabinet does not shield the mobile network signal.

The router has five network connectors: 4 LAN and 1 WAN, which can be turned into a fifth LAN in the settings. The registrar is connected to one connector, to four cameras.

Cameras and recorder

Unfortunately, the cameras and recorder that I have installed are no longer sold on Aliexpress. I use 2.1 MP cameras with a SONY IMX323 sensor and a mini recorder that records to a USB flash drive or MicroSD card.

Now on the same links they sell cameras in the same cases, but with Chinese sensors. There are many options - 3MP, 4MP, 5MP, 8MP with different lenses and different power supplies. I would now choose the 3.6 mm option (this is a viewing angle of about 90 degrees), 5MP DC12V.

I haven’t found cheap registrars who can write to flash drives on Ali right now. I would take like this registrar board and some cheap SSD-drive as a storage device for it.

My entire country video surveillance system cost me less than 10 thousand rubles and has been working perfectly for three years no worse than expensive systems.

I wrote about it in detail in 2019 (my article here), but since then the links have lost relevance, so I decided to talk about it again.

Peace for everyone!

© 2022, Alexey Nadezhin

For twelve years I have been writing about technology, discounts, interesting places and events. Read my blog site ammo1.ru, in Learn, Zen, Mirtesen, Telegram.
My projects:
lamptest.ru. I test LED lamps and help you figure out which ones are good and which are not so good.
Elerus.ru. I collect information about domestic electronic devices for personal use and share it.
You can contact me in the Telegram group
@ammochat.

#CCTV#country house#cameras#do it yourself