Gadgetory

our journey began when I made the admittedly short-sighted decision to purchase three drop cat excuse me nest cams without reading the fine print sure they had excellent image quality a modern design and a super easy to use app but there was one fatal flaw in addition to the $150 per camera upfront cost nest wants a whopping five to thirty dollars per camera per month to store the footage in the cloud for you and they offer no way for you to hook up your own storage device so we put together this it costs a third as much and has no monthly fees speaking of things with no monthly fees that is to say as long as you pay for it yearly private Internet access it's a VPN service that encrypts all of your Internet traffic and uses a safe protected IP it's got a ton of other useful features too so check it out at the link below there are a ton of reasons why someone might want a security camera system even if you're not a drug dealer or whatever a handful of cameras on your property can act as a deterrent for would-be burglars remember they're often after the easy score not the big one they can be a convenient way to monitor your pets or kids when they're at home alone they can significantly aid law enforcement efforts to recover stolen goods and this one's kind of a no-brainer they can even lower your insurance rates making it so they effectively pay for themselves so what do we got well the bill 3ch is actually pretty simple all we need is a rasp i 0w so that's wireless so you don't need a dongle or anything like that a little camera module it connects with a ribbon cable and there's even a prebuilt operating system some guy made called motion iOS is it free yeah sick and open-source all right let's do it since these cameras are intended for use indoors we forwent any waterproofing but this could be done fairly easily with some silicone and conformal coating so after two days of tinkering with the software measuring the electronics and modifying some existing models from Thingiverse we had a couple of options for 3d printed enclosures for our cameras so the model I found online actually needed a little modification for the heatsink wait how's Barry PI runs that hot yeah especially when you overclock which we're gonna do it's a it's a preset that's built in but you can get much better frame rate when you overclock them and I made a little arm that adjusts both ways so you can lots of tilting pan that's cool I see we've taken the Chinese action cam approach and ripped off GoPro hey man they make good stuff ok other way there you go for those of you hoping to build something similar at home you can pick up a case with holes already cut for the official razz pie camera modules from mod mypie or you could get the models linked in the description printed from a company like Shapeways okay so I pre-configured the OS and the Wi-Fi is that can be a little time-consuming the first time but we should just need to plug it in and wait for it to boot up hopefully it actually works right and powered yeah I know but it might not have detected it so now that we're booted up you can see our IP we've got a login screen we should really do a written guide on this yeah we just on the form probably should you could do that up for me that would be great thanks okay let's see the interface so this is really cool the number of customization options in the software can look a little overwhelming at first but the premise is pretty simple now we just have this camera module here attached to this R as PI at the moment so all we need to do is add the camera in set up our desired config so we're going to use 720p 10 fps and then just set the footage to store on one of our servers here at the office what actually gets recorded is pretty much up to you so we're setting ours up to just continuously record up to a maximum of twenty four hour long clips with a preservation length of one month after which the old footage will be automatically deleted but you can also set it to record only when motion is detected which will help you preserve space and your sanity if you ever have to go back into the footage to look for something so our config will change a little bit once we have multiple cameras but we can talk more about that later so this is pretty cool already but we can take it to another level a more conventional security camera enclosure would keep our R as PI's zeros much safer outside and would look a lot more like a professionally installed security system so we actually borrowed the idea of a common home security back buying fake CCTV cameras off Amazon to kind of like set up around your property except we are going to put real cameras inside you know I'd say you're a genius but it was my idea once our fake cameras arrived cracking them open revealed an almost entirely empty casing perfect we didn't end up 3d printing a little holding bracket for our camera but if I were you I wouldn't bother it's much easier to just remove the black plastic piece that holds the fake camera and hot glue the real one into place as for the power cable the rear housing just needed a little hole for it so now that we have two cameras with the potential for more it's actually recommended that you get another R as pie and run motion iOS on it as a server mmm no camera attached so we've got an example of what that might look like right here so most of its processing power can be devoted to encoding footage to be stored onto your Nass via the network cable that way you can see all of your Wi-Fi cameras in one place do note though that you will need something like a raspy three plus because a PI zero won't be able to handle the load of a bunch of cameras so that'll limit the resolution and the frame rate of the footage that can be recorded to make this config work better the cameras themselves can be run in a special setup called fast network camera mode which uses the PI zeros GPU to encode a motion JPEG stream to the PI server for much higher image quality and frame rate so you can check out the forum post in the description for a how-to on that these actually looks surprisingly good like that wide-angle looks sick yes so both of them are running 720p 10 FPS right now which doesn't sound like a lot but you know for a security camera it's actually quite a bit yeah I mean these look way better than your average CCTV and all of the footage that you get can either be backed up to Google Drive so goodbye expensive nest subscription or it can be stored directly on a local as or just a PC where it'll be safe from third parties and other prying eyes and because you can choose your own camera elements you can decide what features you want on each one so this one has a fairly narrow field of view whereas the one that we have over there is using a wide-angle lens so I guess it's conclusion time then this DIY solution is a super awesome way to keep you in control of your cameras and it can actually help save you a very significant amount of money every month for your home or business but there are some compromises first we're giving up any special features like audio whether it's two-way or one-way second the control panel does look pretty great as a mobile webpage but you'll need to do port forwarding tomfoolery in order to access it remotely and there is currently no Android or iOS app and then finally the casings and mounts frankly don't really look that great oh and keep in mind that you won't have any support number to call if you're having issues as helpful as those typically may or may not be the cove commuter is a portable bluetooth speaker that you can take anywhere that's where the portable part comes in it connects via bluetooth that's where the Bluetooth part comes in and features 10 meter range that's almost 33 feet it features an X bass subwoofer to let you feel the bass and it doubles as a speakerphone for incoming calls the rechargeable battery can last up to 8 hours and is water-resistant with an IP x4 rating it's got two EQ modes one designed for indoors and one designed for outside and you can check it out today at the link below so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed and maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one sans whole and our community forum which you should totally join which is by the way where you're gonna find the guide for how to make yourself one of these on Lachie