Today we received the question,
“How to control a web cam via internet,
i want to use it for security reasons, always out of the house and my PC connected want to open the cam from time to time to checkout if something wrong!!”
- [Mohamed Saleh]
What a fun project we thought! And so many different ways of tackling it. Find out what we suggested to [Mohamed] after the break.
Initially we wanted to create an extremely complicated setup, using a USB camera, server, webhosting, and a ton of scripts/programming to create a rather sweet camera setup.
But of course, complication breads problems, and while digging through our box of parts and supplies we stumbled upon an old Axis 206 IP Network Camera. What could be easier than all of the above built into one slick device!
The camera comes with an Ethernet cable, wall-wort for power, and a CD with instructions – we just threw the latter away and winged it, by finding out how to reset the device, then its default ip, we had view of the camera within our network in no time.
A simple port forward of 80 and we could view it outside of our network (so long as we typed in our IP). What we would recommend however, is setting up a DNS (DynDNS is great) service on a computer within the network that points to the cameras IP. That way the URL becomes www.HADCamera.com, a lot easier than 249.135.184.204:80. (Both are fake URLs sorry).
Taking it further, if you had a computer nearby you could setup a simple stepper motor and control the position of the camera.
This is of course our take on the matter and part of Ask HackADay is what our readers would do, so how would you setup a home security camera?
