One thing you might think about is how to supply power to all your cameras, computers, etc. If the electricity is turned off in your house, unless you have battery backup, you are out of luck.

If you went the route of hardwired ETHERNET you could have a UPS at your main control computer and use Power Over Ethernet (PoE) to deliver up to 90 Watts of power to each node, plenty of power to run cameras, LED infrared lights, computers or other small devices.

Most UPS devices can deliver a relatively huge amount of power by today's "Pi" standards, and you can buy switches that can power the leads going off.

On Wed, Mar 2, 2016, 09:27 brad <bkn@ithryn.net> wrote:

> On Mar 1, 2016, at 09:30, Michael Voorhis <mvoorhis@cs.wpi.edu> wrote:
>
> On 03/01/2016 09:20, Frank Sweetser wrote:
>> * Assume wireless will stop working, because at some point it will. Wire is
>> pretty cheap (you can get good prices on bulk wire at Monoprice), and it will
>> more than make up for it's cost in reliability, performance, and security.
>
> At some point you may decide that one shot every 20/30s isn't enough, so
> having a fast reliable network will become more and more important, as
> you add cameras and start increasing frame-rates. Depending on the size
> of picture you want to store (once again think about Frank's other list
> items -- image resolution & quality) you can saturate a low throughput
> network. If you're doing multiple cameras, or having multiple pictures
> coming into the server per second, post-processing of the images on the
> server end, you will end up with a CPU bottleneck.
>
> Look at the low-light performance of your cameras also. You don't want
> to record a blur ... you want a useful picture of a person that you can
> show to the authorities. Make sure the target area is well-lit.
>

Thank you for the responses. It sounds as if the PI is a good platform. The wired/wireless is a tradeoff like any other. I’m not sure i have any network drops in the area the camera would be mounted. If only i had the foresight it would have have network/power drops put on at the top of wall which we just installed this summer. If i can find a way do it nicely w/ wires i will. I will also investigate the frame rate. I specified 20-30s frequency more to emphasize that i didn’t require streaming video. It will take some experimenting.

I do plan to off load the images on a regular basis (perhaps even instantly) i assumed these devices were short on storage. I have a NUC on site which i use as a VPN/SSH end point. i will likely offload images to the NUC (and/or owncloud instance) then use mencoder (or something similar) to create a timelapse video.

It will be a fun project, hopefully i can carve out some time for it soon.
Cheers,
- brad

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