Well it's been a fair while since I posted on this blog as so much has been happening, but I thought it was time I did a short update.

At the start of the year we installed a 6kW solar system and that has been the topic of a fair few of my recent blog postings

As per my earlier posts on home security...;

... my el-cheapo system has been serving us well , apart from having to replace a 2TB hard drive which apparently 'wore out' from constant access.

As a quick recap, we have a central PC system which acts as the security server.

This has 2x 4port TE104 capture cards using the CONEXANT 878a chips

To these cards we have connected 5 hard-wired CCD cameras

and 2 2.4GHz wireless cameras

These are all managed by the original version of the Pico2000 software

We also purchased our first PTZ IP camera

but sadly the Pico2000 software doesn't understand the concept of an IP camera so I've been using the supplied WANSCAN software separate from the Pico system but this is quite tedious and their recording compression isn't great so I've been on the lookout for a "budget" replacement for the Pico software and think I may have found it.

It looks like the

Argus DVR software

will provide management of hard-wired composite, IP and USB as well as control of PTZ cameras all for a fairly "reasonable" price of US$118 for 8 cameras, so as soon as I've saved my pennies, I plan on giving this a whirl.

Of course I'll also need at-least one PTZ controller interface as well

but I'll post about that once I have it all bought and working

Labels: camera, cctv, composite, IP, Pico2000, PTZ, security, wired, wireless

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Sunday, September 01, 2013

Upgrading the Home CCTV security

Argus DVR software