Friday, September 27, 2013

How I Turned My Tablet Into An IP Camera


I was going on a three week trip and wanted to keep an eye on the house.  Knowing an IP camera would allow me to monitor the house remotely, I shopped them.  There are some great deals on IP cameras with pan-tilt-zoom, and I’ve played with a FOSCAM in the past.  But I didn’t want to be tied to their software, or mess with ip addressing or router ports.

I realized that a tablet computer with a built in camera has all the same gear as an IP camera, and more.  I have a Motorola XOOM tablet that I wasn’t planning to bring on the trip.  So I started playing with apps.

I tried several, finally ending up on SECuRET SpyCam.  It costs $4.49 in the Google Play store.  I settled on this software because it did not lock up the laptop, the menu options were easy to navigate through and the demo actually worked.


Another important thing that drew me to this app is that it uploads to Dropbox, which I could check with my laptop and no special software.  I set it up using the back camera, set the XOOM on the OEM Motorola charging stand and got it plugged in, arranged it on top of my desk facing the kitchen and family room, and pressed ‘Start’.
The angle of this stand pointed the camera down, so I needed it up high.  However any stand would work, or just prop the tablet up against something.  I hid it with a piece of paper, making sure to leave the camera lens uncovered.  If a burglar broke in he would be unlikely to see it.

We have a dog, two cats, three kids and a busy house.  It started triggering immediately and uploading 30 second videos to a folder on my dropbox account.

After we delivered the menagerie to friends & relatives to care for while we were gone, and just before we left the house, I sat down at my desktop computer and deleted all the junk videos.  It caught 3 videos of us leaving the house.  That's daughter #2 playing piano in the background, waiting for us to get ready to leave.  Then the camera recorded nothing for several days.

On vacation, after we’d checked into the hotel and relaxed a bit, I would point my laptop browser to my dropbox account and check the folder.  For days there was nothing but those three files of us leaving the house.  Then there was a windy day and the moving light through the windows triggered the motion capture.  I was able to see a 30 second video taken only a few hours ago, and know that the camera was working, uploading and that no one was in my house.

For the three weeks, there were about a dozen such videos, where the light from the windows changed enough to trigger the capture.  In each, I could tell no one was in my house.

The quality of the video was very good, and each 30 second video was about 23 MB.  This means that in a free Dropbox account (2 GB) you’ll only be able to store less than 90 videos.  That’s 45 minutes worth of video.  Files are date and time stamped, so it is clear when things happened.

If someone was in your house, you would easily be able to identify his face.  The video was that good.  And those tablet  cameras are amazingly good at seeing in the dark.  Also, you could forward a copy of the video file to the police, and upload it directly to Youtube.

Features I’d like to see would be some sort of heartbeat, or timer in the software to allow me to trigger the system, say once each day or once each 12 hours.  This would assure me it was working.  Also there is no feature in the software to erase files off Dropbox; no first-in-first-out feature.  I’d like that.  Also the file format of the videos is .3gp.  My laptop had no problem with this, but an Apple device I tried to use didn't like that flavor.
A very important point is that I turned off app-upgrades in the google play store.  This way no apps would upgrade, causing the tablet to restart.  I also shut down all the apps I could, so the camera app was the only one running.
For $4.49 and a little experimenting, I bought a lot of peace of mind.