Using Zoneminder for something other than Security

[phazey]

Hi,

I'd thought I would post a little something here about how I plan to use Zoneminder. Maybe what I am trying to do will inspire others in the future.

I'm involved in making a TV documentry covering rare wildlife on a uninhabited island in SE Asia. Our main aim is to have this island included in a national park as there is evidence of Asian Tigers living there. Obviously as the place is so large and the wildlife so illusive we're planning to deploy Zoneminder powered camera traps at key locations. These units will be connected via a 900mhz serial ip network to a basecamp well out of the way. Using cheap 2nd hand laptops, an IR illuminated webcam and some batteries we hope to have day and night coverage for about 5 consecutive days.

Camera traps and fully networkable cameras do indeed exist today, so why am i re-inventing the wheel?

Well, the excellent "cam-trakker", does everything we need apart from one thing. They need to be visited for film changes/image downloads. The area we are covering would mean a 4 day hike in dense jungle just for that.

I've also looked at the Axis 2420 network camera. This is the ideal package as far as i am concerned - apart from the inhibitivly high cost per unit.

My site budget is $600 for everything - so i came up with idea of using the laptop/webcam method.

The other spin on this method is that we will know immediatly when (if) a capture takes place. this is useful for scientific data etc, knowing the animals habits ahead of the real filming schedule.

Part of the script will include some info on the technology we use for certain things, so maybe you'll see the Zoneminder site with that "as seen on tv" comment :)

Anyways, I'll continue posting my progress and eventually some pictures of the unit here (if we're lucky some captures too)- maybe someone out there will be able to offer better suggestions than the ideas i currently have.

So far Zoneminder looks great Philip - I'll start playing with it for real tomorrow so we'll see how it goes.

Cheers

Karl

[zoneminder]

Hi Karl,

Thanks for telling us about this and good luck with it. It sounds very interesting, so if you need any help with your setup just ask.

If my cameras are anything to go by one thing to be careful of is moths that sometimes seem to be attracted to IR as much as regular lights, so you get a massive white blob in your image where a moth decides to sit across your camera. I'm sure you'd take that though if you get to see a tiger or two!

Cheers,

Phil,

[fernando]

i dont recommend use ir iluminaned cams..
i recommend to use security B/W 0.1 lux retail cams with autoiris.
they can see with moonlight wery good.
can use 4mm to 8mm autoiris.
in usa. can cost all 100 uss. or less.
they are ntsc and need 12v. cosume less than 0.2 amps..

i like your proyect keep us inform.

Fernando.

[ekiboy69]

Hi,

I found this thread when our system is up and running. We are using ZM for a very specific purpose: monitoring bats during daylight in an attic.

The bats stay away from the sunlight during daytime. It is not known, not very well at least what they do and how much they move during daytime.

We have one Av Tech AVC308 B/W camera that has 6 IR Leds. The surveillance area is about 1,2 m x 1 m area: the conjunction of chimney and roof. The bats were known to exit there.

There is a _lot_ of movement. After tweaking and banging head against the wall we now have the data from the first 30 hours: 32 gigabytes of data! All movement! That is quite a lot considering we use 320 x 240 resolution and grayscale.

I'll try to put some videos online a bit later. We have bat moms with babies crawling beside them

If there's someone out there that would like exchanges thoughts especially about monitoring wildlife&animals, please send me a line!

For the ZM developers I would like to express my deepest gratitude. This software simply makes me giggle at the moment

[zoneminder]

Hi,

I'm very pleased to have made you giggle and even more pleased that you have found such an original use for ZM. Please feel free to post some bat movies or if you have trouble hosting them just mail them to me and I'll put them on the site.

Cheers,

Phil,

[cordel]

The camera I've been using are as far as I can tell are made by KT&C. They are BW with .0003 Lux rating. You add the lens you need for your application. They work extreamly well with IR Illuminators and look almost like daylight with them. I have been getting mine through http://www.supercircuits.com
Here is the link to that camera
http://www.supercircuits.com/STORE/prod ... 4&mitem=10
They also have one that has 600 lines of res that work great but more spendy. I have a couple of the high Res one with my 5-50 mm auto iris lens that gets plate no. from vehicles as they drive in and out of the court. I couldn't be happier. They are very compact (My first camera I ordered with Twisted pair baluns and the box for the camera was the same size. I thought they forgot to send the camera ) and run on 12VDC. They support both types of Auto iris (DC and Video) or no auto iris lens along with C or CS mount. I will not use anything else now that I found these. I have 6 now 2 with 5-50mm lens (covers the street and court that I live in), one with 4mm pinhole (covers my driveway), 3 with 4mm lens (covers the perimiter of the house). All lens are auto iris to make them as able to see in the least light possible. They also make a color version of this camera that I will get to play with in a couple weeks.