Talk:MidsouthMakers Webcams

Reasons for Shop Cam

• Added security
  • This will benefit Glenn and Jeff too
  • Can tell when unapproved people are using equipment
• Safety
• Additional coverage of entire space, helps determine when users are present

General Notes

• Ben E. will be checking for conduits and usability of conduit for wiring the camera directly
• There is currently a system in the shop that is bridged wirelessly to the network
• Proposed camera
  • Ben E. $15 pledged
  • Dan Hess $15 pledged

Technicals of Wireless Operation of the Webcam

• A 802.11g wifi network has a theoretical maximum of 54 MBit. Using TCP (instead of UDP) over a non-line of sight link is going to result in a significant reduction. Converting MBits to MBytes tells you that the theoretical maximum of 802.11g is 6.75 MBytes per second. Toss in other nodes into the wireless network and you'll be lucky to achieve 20% of the theoretical bandwidth, or 1.35 Megabytes per second.
• A mjpeg stream at 30 frames per second uses approximately 819 Kbytes per second. In other words, you would need almost the entire link bandwidth for a single camera. Add two cameras and you've over-saturated the link.
• 640x480
• A single frame coming off the current IP cameras is in the neighborhood of 40 kb
• The live streams are only available outside the network to a handful (if that many) and they're only available INSIDE the network to anyone who's been smart enough to port scan the place
• What is the necessary frame rate? Would 20 or even 10 be acceptable\practical?
• All current cameras have RJ45 jacks