seanspotatobiz
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- Apr 22, 2010
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We live in a bad area and my mum's car has been vandalised a few times. I want to put some cameras on the outside of the house but they need to be very subtle or the cameras themselves are likely to be targeted (I hope to fix the cameras to a disused satellite dish which will obscure them). My plan is to connect two or maybe three USB cameras to my otherwise useless 10-year old laptop running either Windows 7 (with Internet disabled) or Linux, probably with an external HDD. Cameras with decent resolution and decent frame rates are expensive but I guess 15 FPS is adequate. I think the resolution should be ~4K because mum sometimes needs to park on the opposite side of the road and at that distance 1080p might not give enough identifying detail. I found this module without an extra lens and this module with an extra lens on AliExpress. I was thinking I could waterproof them with some insulating varnish (I already own some) although I'm a bit unsure about the lens; I don't want to accidentally get varnish in or on the lens/sensor. Does anyone recommend alternative cameras? I don't want to use really cheap ones because the images will probably be nearly useless. The cameras I linked to have permanent IR filters, I suppose, so you can't switch them to a night mode with external IR flood lights (I'd prefer IR flood lights because they're more subtle and regular floodlights might attract complaints anyway). There's a company called Wyze that makes cameras with a night mode but they're only 1080p which I don't think is enough.