Outside Camera
The Panasonic BL-C140A network cameras that we installed have built-in web software, and other nice features. They have a proprietary Power over Ethernet (POE) feature. If your camera is 100 feet or less from a power source, you can use the standard Cat 5 cable to power your camera. Unfortunately, our coop was about 200 feet from the nearest power source, so we had to extend a separate power line to the coop. Other cameras can be placed about 300 feet from the power source if they have industry standard POE specifications.
The cameras are wired from the coop with Cat 5 cables through a Trendnet network switch to our Airport Extreme router. Panasonic cameras are packaged with a set-up CD for PCs only. They are compatible with Mac, and the tech folks at the help desk will patiently guide you through the set-up, operation for the cameras, and router configuration.
Panasonic provides a free DDNS website for all of its cameras. By registering on the site, the camera is given a unique name (like having its own website), and can be accessed over the internet by anyone of your choosing. The images are displayed real time and with full motion. We access this site on a regular basis to see how our hens are doing, checking out who is laying, and making sure the local foxes are not harassing the hens. We also use this site as the source for our website images.
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Inside Camera Facing Nest Boxes
Our website includes HTML code and Javascript to direct your browser to capture our images from the Panasonic DDNS website. By using the Panasonic website, we avoid having our own server, web and video software, and static IP. The three-second refresh of the images is a compromise because of bandwidth and web hosting cost.
The image capture and display code was the most difficult, frustrating, and a time consuming part of the website construction. However, if you know how to write code, it takes no time at all. We were able to make it work through the efforts of family techies and an expert.
We hope that this explanation will be of help to some of you. If you find it difficult to understand it might be because we find it hard to explain. If you get a website up and running with a similar camera, please let us know, we would love to see it!.
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