Shop Safety Addition

[Matt Meiser]

Since I was injured about a year ago in the shop, my wife and I have talked about how we could put in a camera so she could easily check on me. I finally broke down and bought a Linksys wireless webcam that looks like it will fit the bill. I've got it set up so she can pull up a browser and check on me in a few seconds. Right now it is "intranet" only, but with some setup I plan to expose it to the web, with some security so that I'm not on display for all to see. :rolleyes:

[Jon Shively]

What are you gonna do when she figures out how much fun you are having and aren't actually "slaving" away out there? grin

[Don Bullock]

Very nice idea Matt. I've also thought of some sort of panic button attached to our home alarm system that would summon the fire department and parimedic if pressed.

[Jim Becker]

'Looking forward to your comments on how well the camera works...I'm thinking about one to monitor our home addition project as well as pull a daily image of the same.

[Matt Meiser]

Very nice idea Matt. I've also thought of some sort of panic button attached to our home alarm system that would summon the fire department and parimedic if pressed.

We got that last summer. Our security system has a separate partition for my shop and the house, so they effectively each have a separate security system. Each keypad has panic, fire, and medical buttons.

[Matt Meiser]

'Looking forward to your comments on how well the camera works...I'm thinking about one to monitor our home addition project as well as pull a daily image of the same.

Jim, as you can see its not the best image. The main reason I chose this camera is that it was available at Best Buy and therefore easily returnable if I wasn't happy. It has a native 320x240 image and I set the image quality to the highest level and then modified the code from their web page (which I grabbed by doing a View Source) and modified it to load the image viewer control and set the size to 640x480. My next step is to figure out how to grab a JPEG regularly. I'd be happy to share all this with you if you want.

[Mike Buelow]

We got that last summer. Our security system has a separate partition for my shop and the house, so they effectively each have a separate security system. Each keypad has panic, fire, and medical buttons.

Use that thing to create time lapse videos on your next project. Those are a lot of fun. I have one of me smashing up my old front walk with a sledgehammer over the course of 4 hours.

For those thinking similar ideas, they do make baby monitors with video cameras now too. Not cheap, but IIRC those wifi webcams are about $100 still.

[Matt Meiser]

Mike, we actually originally tried one of the wireless security camera systems, but my shop is too far from the house for it to work. The webcam only works because of a rather complex network configuration I've got built at home that uses an access point and a wireless bridge, both with better antennas, to get wireless ethernet to the shop.

[Matt Meiser]

To update, I ended up taking back the Linksys camera and getting a D-Link DCS-900 camera from Amazon. The Linksys didn't support getting a single image without using thier software and their ActiveX control for playing the video was kind of flakey. The new camera has better resolutions, but a slightly smaller field of view. Overall it works much better. I'm also using a wired connection to my shop office for a more stable connection. The D-Link camera is only $79 at Amazon.