Monitoring Cattle calving remotely using IP Web Cams

baronflyguy

Hi,

I have a farmer friend who lives about 30mins drive away from his farm. His cows will be calving very soon and he wants to setup an internet video image feed of his farm so he can monitor cattle calving remotely (i.e. at home).

In general Cattle will calve without any human help but, on occasion, the calving process can experience difficulties. Should assistance be required, it is very important that experienced or veterinary help is summoned immediately in order to save the life of the calf and its mother. For the farmer this involves a lot of late nights and dawn risings to keep an ever watchful eye on animals in the period leading up to, during and immediately after calving.

Shed information - total shed area size is 40 ft by 60 ft
3 pens at the end of the shed that he wants to monitor are 20 ft by 15 ft

I haven't setup IP Web Cams before and have little experience with them.
Installation and setup is not my day job but I have an idea what to do.
He has asked me to give him a hand setting something up in a cost effective way.

Attached you will find a diagram of how I envisage it might look and work.

Wireless Broadband
==================
I was thinking of PermaNET Broadband (my friends farm is located in Wexford on flat area and should be able to get signal from Fort mountain near by). From my experience with Mobile Broadband I find them flakely and unreliable. I think Wireless would give him a more stable and reliable connection. There is no phone line on the farm so that rules out DSL.

IP Web Cams
========
No idea yet what to get. So many out there and dont want to spend a fortune on one.
This one here on Komplett looks good.
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=446540
But not sure if it would suit farm shed environment.
No pushed on remote movement of camera.
Infra red would be handy but if it costs too much then we could do without.
He said he can leave big shed light on for the nights
I assume you can set refesh rate of when image snaps are taken on the cameras and also specify adding date and time to them.

FLAN (Farm Local Area Network) connectivity
===========================================
I was thinking of wireless but we could go with Ethernet Cabling also.
Just want to make sure cables are well protected from Rat/Mice interference.
The Web cams would need a power source so that would be taken into account.

So the reason I have posted here is to ask you techies can you think of any other reasonable solution to fit my friends requirements?
Also can any recommend IP web cams that might be suitable?
He isn't interested in top of the range cameras, he just needs to be able to see a rough idea of what is going on. Black and white images would suffice.

I have never used IP Web cams before, are they user friendly so I can quickly setup feed to be vieweable on the internet?

Your feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks
BFG

Some_Person

I assume he doesn't have a line of sight to the shed from his house?
Are 2 cameras all he needs?

baronflyguy

Some_Person wrote: »

I assume he doesn't have a line of sight to the shed from his house?
Are 2 cameras all he needs?

Hi Some_Person,
Sorry I should have mentioned, he lives 30 min drive away from the farm. Hence why a remote monitoring system would be a huge help to him.
So no is the answer to your line of sight question.
He may need more than 2 cameras. Not sure yet. It will depend on when we get something setup and how it looks.

- BFG

Some_Person

I haven't used IP cameras either but you'll have to ask Permanet to have the right ports open etc so you can access the cameras on the net.
I'd say wireless would be handier, then you only need to worry about power cabling/sockets.
Does the Access Point have to be outside the shed or elsewhere?

baronflyguy

Some_Person wrote: »

I haven't used IP cameras either but you'll have to ask Permanet to have the right ports open etc so you can access the cameras on the net.
I'd say wireless would be handier, then you only need to worry about power cabling/sockets.
Does the Access Point have to be outside the shed or elsewhere?

Yes it would be good to get feedback from someone who has IP camera experience.
I have sent an email to PermaNET telling them what I would like to do. No reply yet.
I'm trying to get the ball rolling.
Wireless Access Point will probably be in the shed. My diagram is not 100%. just a rough idea.

Some_Person

A directional antenna like the Nanostation 2 should be fine, aim it where the cameras are. Put it in AP bridge mode. You probably won't need the output power too high either.

baronflyguy

This infra red outdoor IP camera looks interesting.
http://www.equicom.ie/outdoor-ip-camera-744-p.asp

Has anyone used this company or camera before?
There is no make or model for it so I'm guessing it is a no brand model from china or something.

Knasher

I don't have any experience with ip cameras, but just some general pointers. Seeing you are going to have to do some sort of cabling anyway for the power, I would just go with wired cameras and use power over ethernet so you can keep the adapters in the same place as your router to protect them from dust and condensation.

roadrunnermick

Hey everyone , any update on how you got in with this , Have a similar issue myself, so would love to know how it was sorted

I see http://www.wi-pipe.com, planning to use those guys

thanks

robin3

+1, how did you get on baronflyguy? would love to hear if you got it sorted

Plus any info on IP cameras? Looking at getting a camera in shed about 500m from house (have a good line of sight) so shouldn't have any problem getting picture to tv in house, but would also like to be able to access it over web, so to allow me to check back on cows when I'm not around/at work etc

looking into a dvr with this capability, bout how much will i pay? so it'll send via broadband in the house( am connected by 3, so don't think its a fixed ip address, and have no landline in the house, am in rural area eircom broadband lines do not reach my remote location) is there any company doing a fixed ip address broadband, over wireless network?

Is there another way of setting this up?

kenyDoIt

Hi to everyone. just putting a few pic's of an ip cam up online at www.mayohandyman.ie, i'll be happy to talk anyone through this for free.(my number is on the web site ), but this is not a the only way, now that I have this working I have been doing more work with this and if it's under 2 miles you can use vhf for half the price and you do not need line of site.