Connecting a PIR sensor to IP cam

PaulKK

Hi all,

I've been spending the evening in vain trying to set up my wansview NC541W IP camera to trigger its alarm from a PIR sensor.

I currently have my security setup with a raspberry pi running motion and it works okish, but I find that it often doesn't capture pictures quickly enough and is often triggered by light etc.

I decided to try and hook up a PIR sensor instead and then trigger an FTP upload from the camera itself. This hopefully should be a lot more accurate.

In the web cam manual it states that Pins 1 and 2 are for alarm input:


I got myself a PIR sensor and hooked it up to the camera.. however when I armed the alarm input, it just triggered alarm every every 30 seconds, regardless of the PIR sensor being connected or not. It seems like the camera completely ignores the attached sensor. The alarm trigger level is set to high on the camera, i.e when voltage is supplied.


I tried with both the VCC output and ground in pins 1 and 2 with no luck.

Here is my PIR sensor:


and here is my input into the camera:


I am powering the PIR off of a usb cable (the black wire in the usb cable):


Has anyone got any ideas? Is it just that its a cheap camera and this just wont work how I want it to?

backboiler

Do you have the USB supply ground connected to the camera's power supply ground? This is required to ensure the PIR module and camera agree on the I/O pin's voltage level.

Another possibility is that the output level of the PIR module is the inverse of the camera's I/O pin's expectation. That is, camera may expect active low input but PIR has active high output. A logic inverter would fix this, if applicable.

As well, there are a lot of clones of the original IP camera design going around and this may be one. They look the same but have different software running on the processor, so may not use the I/O ports in the same way, or may not even even use them at all.