Sandaysoft

(Hunting for a bottle of Scapa once I've completed this)

It arrived yesterday by surface turtle.

Mine came Monday!

It looks just as described. The pictures are deceiving. This is a somewhat bulky creature, (bigger than a fizzie-pop can). That said, it also appears to be very well built and skookum enough to handle a bit of jostling.

I would agree, it is a pretty good sized camera, although the mounting screws they sent with it are so short, I decided to get longer ones so that there is no chance it can come out of the wall, I used 8 inch screws to mount my weather station, so yeah...

Immediate issues:
1. Getting the antenna mounted on the rear panel was a little fiddly. It is a small brass coupler requiring a very small wrench. (The shroud slides forward out of the way however getting the coupler to seat still required a tool).

Yes it is! And every time you try to get the antenna to look nice pointing straight up it is either to tight to move, or then loosens it...

2. The instruction manual is written in micro-print and required a magnifying glass to read. I downloaded the manual from FOSCAM which contains a quick set-up guide, a detailed manual for both Windows and Mac and, above all, is easy to read.

Their manual didn't even correspond to the camera I got. lol

3. The software CD included in the box was... EMPTY! Luckily, the FOSCAM site in (2) above has all the IPCam Tools Setup available for download. Unzipped (they're .RAR) and saved, things were pretty straight forward... sort of.

I found that software kind of stupid, all it does it tell you the LAN IP that your camera is using, which can be found easily using other means, like looking at the attached devices on your router.

4. READ THE INSTALLATION manual carefully. The grammar can be a bit tough to follow.



5. The Realtime camera control software is OK. It uses a web-browser for access to administrator functions. It uses Internet Explorer as a "preferred" browser but allows a login by "pushing" Firefox or others on a separate login button. I don't use IE normally but discovered that using any other browser didn't produce all the features available through IE. Recommend using IE to manage the camera.

Mine works fine using firefox, safari, and chrome on different OS's.

6. When doing initial set up, do it hard-wired into the router with the very short cat 5 cable provided. (or use your own longer one)

7. You can do almost everything from the camera monitoring software provided including streaming, http uploading and ftp. However, I didn't like the FTP service page in the set up. There is no scheduler so it's off to a 3rd party app to get things working.

The other thing with the FTP it offers is that it uploads new files every time, not overwriting old files (Example: uploads image1.jpg and then 5 minutes later or w/e it uploads image2.jpg not overwriting the original)

8. Yawcam was in a struggle finding the video stream. It detected the camera easily enough but could not connect. I tried WebcamXP5 and watched it cycle through endless connection attempts even though it had reported that the camera and connection was OK. Time-saver: The camera is user identified. In the password option of Yawcam or WebcamXP, (if you haven't modified it in the camera set up) check off the password box and put admin in the user id. (No password required).

9. The camera software and the manual don't describe the video stream. In Yawcam it is suggested that http://(camera ip)/video.mjpeg will acquire the stream. Not so. Luckily WebcamXP, (even though it couldn't connect), produced a dialog box with the name and file extension. http://(webcam IP)/videostream.cgi. Once I had solved the user/password issue in WebcamXP and given Yawcam the correct LAN URL/filename/file extension both worked very well.

Yawcam works fine with it, even though it says .mjpeg only, I used the .cgi file and it picked it right up.

10. I have only just started testing so have yet to put the camera outdoors. (I have a small concern given the advertised operating temperature range of the camera (0 c to 55 c) and we're having a bit of a cold snap here where temps drop below 0 c at night.) That said, initial performance is good indoors. Night vision is not bad and motion detection is quick. I hope to have it mounted and a webcam page inserted into my weather site by the end of the week. The view out the window is reasonably good - not HD - but as others have already pointed out, it's not an HD price. So far, for the cost, this seems like a darned good rig. Once you navigate around the little potholes like software hiccups and fractured English in the instructions, it all appears to be a very simple and worthwhile investment.

I am kind of scared at the operating temps, but nothing I can do about that, it is just going to have to survive the cold.

Hopefully my schedule (that's my employer's nice name for the chaos they present me) allows some time to get this beastie active and online by the end of the week.

Cheers
Dave

Strange about the 0C lower operating temperature - would tend to indicate it's not designed for outdoor use!

Regarding the cable entry, maybe it's sealed inside with a gland. I have CCTV cameras like that.

As for web page server, I found it well worth using an independent hosting company (ISP no longer does it anyway). Plenty of space, plenty of bandwidth, all the bells and whistles including PHP etc. (Mine does all that for 20 UK pounds p.a. - net name extra, xxx.xxx.uk costs £10 for 2 yrs.)

Seems some webcams can put up with having the sun in their view. I have my Microsoft widescreen LifeCam pointing almost due south and the sun has been in view. There appears to be no lasting damage done to the image sensor. There's white-out around the sun when it's in the frame but so far nothing more serious.

Gina, can you Webcam 'see' anything at night - what is the minimum illumination required by your webcam?

The light sensitivity of the webcam might make the difference between a CMOS sensor that can still produce an image after being exposed to the sun...

I'm surprised that it makes it over there. It's a small distillery and (I imagine) not well known outside Orkney.

Strange about the 0C lower operating temperature - would tend to indicate it's not designed for outdoor use!

Regarding the cable entry, maybe it's sealed inside with a gland. I have CCTV cameras like that.

The cable entry bothered me. Years of tearing down things which had suffered from water ingress (even though they were "waterproof") has taught me not to rely on unseen glands. Given the wet winter environment here, I decided that a glob of silicon sealer was a bit of cheap insurance.

Webcam page is here. Dave

I get PAGE NOT FOUND from the link?
The web page you are trying to access doesn't exist on members.shaw.ca