ColorBAT


This is a live view of our Water Garden Pond in our back yard. The pond is illuminated with red lights around the perimeter. But, of course, at night, the infrared sensors on the camera just shows it as a very bright, white, light.	This is a live view in the front of our property looking east on Frederick Street. The flowers in the near-foreground are a night- blooming primrose. They are a bright yellow color, but they only bloom at night when the camera switches to a B&W infrared mode.


This camera is not operating at this time	This camera is not operating at this time

You are looking at live feed from two web cams trained on:

1) Our back yard water garden/pond at our home in Millersville, Pennsylvania
2) The front of our property looking east on Frederick Street

These are 480-line cameras that transmit color images in the daytime and infrared B&W images at night time. Isn't the color quality great! This kind of camera can transmit live, B&W, video even in total darkness. The cameras sells for about $250.00 each. The software that manages the whole thing sells for about $90.00. The cameras are powered by 12 VDC. They use very little electricity - maybe pennies per month, and of course, they are left turned "on" 24/7.

In order to save band-width we have set the transmission of the video to a low frames/second rate (about 7 fps) - but it is fully adjustable. When ever motion is detected, the video clip is saved to our hard drive. The video that is saved onto the hard drive is recorded at about 15 frames/second. That, also, is adjustable. Later, we can review those clips, save them to CD, print out still frames, or simply delete unwanted material. When reviewing the video clips, we can view them at up to 8 times normal speed in order to save time looking through the material. Each video clip is date/time stamped.

When the hard drive is full, the oldest files are automatically deleted to make room for newer files. A 120GB hard drive can hold about 2 weeks of normal activity that has been motion-detected, depending on just how much activity there was to trigger the motion detection. The motion sensitivity can be adjusted. And, we can blank out small areas of the video frame where we do not want motion to be detected. For example, we have blanked out the flags since they are always moving. And, in the back yard, we have blanked out the windmill since it moves a lot on the breezes.

If the screen is gray colored... be patient and wait a few minutes for the video signal to arrive. It all depends on the speed of your internet connection. If your computer's video card is a bit slow to generate screen refreshes, you might try scrolling the little gray-colored video screens (above) out of view and then back into view on your monitor. That will force your computer's video card to generate a "refresh" with the most recently transmitted video data from my cameras.

If there is no image after a few minutes on the camera by the pond, it's because my wife has turned the camera off so she can lay out on the patio in the sunshine and not "be seen by the whole world"! Check back later in a couple of hours!

Later in the Fall of 2007, or maybe early in 2008, we expect to be adding some additional cameras.

If the above camera-display areas are white-colored with a tiny little colored icon in the upper left corner it means that your computer is not configured to receive the live video feed from our cameras.

To view the video, you must have JAVA installed on your system.
Click Here to download and install JAVA. However, just because you might have it installed doesn't mean that it is really working - yet. Click Here to view more details on how to get JAVA turned "on"