Narrative: Just woke up and got my coffee, trying to get organized. I made this rough list of things I want to accomplish, I need to add how much time to allocate to the important ones.
Church service was the first thing I had to accomplish today. It was the most complicated service I’ve ever run with 14 channels being recorded and a few more broadcast. We had one bad cord that took a minute to find and I was a little slow in getting setup today. I thought service went fine and the recording is being checked.
Took a long nap after getting home, I was tired! I used a high quality XLR cables from the old stage wires to the recorder. I am thinking it’s too bulky behind the board to keep them. I bought a 8 ch snake that will be here tomorrow.
Spent a good part of the evening testing our 16 ch digital recorder. The last two inputs are a mystery that I had to solve today!
Narrative: Just woke up and got my coffee, trying to get organized. I made this rough list of things I want to accomplish, I need to add how much time to allocate to the important ones.
I’ve received all the cameras I plan on installing in NV on our next trip out.
I’ve spent the better part of two days updating and configuring these cameras. Originally I was going to have them delivered to us out there. But I just didn’t want to waste two days out there updating and configure them. The going in plan for these cameras is NO centralized Digital Network Recorder (AKA DVR). Each of the cameras will have storage for their own recordings and will forward clips of movement to a Network Attached Storage and my E-Mail.
I need to find a place in their estate to hide the NAS (Network Attached Storage) so that it’s just not sitting on top of a table somewhere.
I found out today that they’ve made a TINY micro SD card that’s 1,000 Gigabytes, which is the same capacity as both the 10Lb Network Attached Storage shown above.
We’ve not heard from the Estate Lawyers, but we are hoping that things are moving forward. We want to address the mail, garbage, Van and Electric company on this trip.
I spent a lot of long hours working out a plan for the 5V power needed for the cameras and NODE MCU uProcessors for the Home Automation. 5V cannot be carried very far and running extension cords across entire rooms is also a significant hazard. These wires will fall apart if tripped over. The power supply is good for voltages up to 24V so very long runs of several hundred feet could easily be accommodated.
By far the greatest contribution to these extended wires is this tiny connector. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but it works. The clasp on the wires is pretty tight provided the wire dimensions are within tolerance. (It is A very small tolerance) There’s also not much in the way of polarity markings either. I ended up using the above picture and putting a copy of it in the bags of connectors so I wouldn’t forget it.
Another problem I ran into is the stripe on twin wires like the one above. The stripe looks very much like the side of a capacitor so I guessed incorrectly on the “Standard” polarity marking. Apparently DC wires have the positive wire marked and the negative wire unmarked as shown above. (Although I’ve run into several cases where it wasn’t over the last couple days.)
Another Amazon non standard is this so called POE injector. (Not really) 100Mbits requires two pairs (Normally Orange and Green) and the remaining two pairs Brown and Blue are hard wired to the barrel connectors. I thought they would have paired them but they didn’t. The center pin uses both blue wires and the sleeve uses both brown wires. Still though this would be quite effective to bring 12VDC out to a camera especially considering they are doubling the 24AWG into a ~21AWG power wire. You can tell if the “Bean Counters” got to a product when you open it up and there’s 28AWG power wires that have 7 strands of stiff maybe steel 32AWG wire.
I modified the 2.5mm Barrel connectors to the generic connector I am using on all these small wire projects. Now I can provide virtually any kind of power to the end of a Ethernet connection. The only thing I don’t like about this modification is it involves eight crimp connections, if any one of them fail, the power will fail.
Mock Arnold schwarzenegger all you want to but he’s the guy that stopped manufactures from making 80% efficient chargers that sell for $30USD to save three cents. It was costing Californians millions of dollars in electricity. (MFR doesn’t have to pay that!) Not to mention California doesn’t have enough power for its population. I probably have 30 USB chargers lying around, i think i’ll setup an inverter and measure the efficiency to get rid of the cheap ones.
Narrative: Still working on replacement cameras for Nevada. I really like the Amcrest cameras, but I don’t want to by their DVR if I don’t have too. The cameras come with the option of saving the movie clips to a Networked Drive.
The thing I found out this morning with the D-Link DNS-321 is that they have an underscore in the file path which is not allowed in the camera. Boo!
I dug up an old DVR that I bought waay back in 2018, i didn’t like it then and I still don’t like it. It’s home is in China and updates/cloud/Active X plug-in’s are all from China too. I took the HD out of the unit and disposed of it. There was hardly anything in it, just a box with a HD.
I found a solution after 5 hours playing with these cameras. SD Card will reduce the bandwidth on the network AND I don’t have to buy a NVR! I have two 128GB cards, I’ve ordered 6 more of them.
Narrative: I want to buy two new NAS boxes, but I’ll have to wait on one of them for a bit. I have to conserve what little money I have left.
Obsolete Network Attached Storage
One of the three DNS-321 boxes has a bad hard drive.
I checked my closet and i had an identical drive with a bunch of recorded TV on it. Very early this morning i installed the drive, formatted the both of them as a RAID 1 and then ran a diagnostic test on them.
Three hours later the enclosure approved the drives for use. The next challenge is setting up a “Public” folder that the cameras can put their video on. I also have a traditional DNR that links to a China cloud, but it’s good enough to use for a VPN circuit if I block access to the Internet. My third option is to actually buy a ASUSTOR to link to the cameras.
First up though is to update all these cameras to the latest firmware and have them reach out to a known wireless network.
Don’t forget to mow the lawn, even in the dark… LOL
Narrative: I spent almost the whole day working on documenting our next Sunday service. It seems I’ve been elected as the most knowledgeable individual to support their service.
The first drawing is about the stage itself, they wanted something that was a little more descriptive though.
I used PP to create this slide and graphics to make it more clear.
This slide shows the wires going to the sound board.
This graphic shows the starting position of all the controls of the board.
The next thing I spent a good deal of time on was the cameras in Vegas. All the D-Link cameras are going out of support in September. I LOVE the Amcrest cameras but it was suggested that I try the “Blink” cameras.
The thing about these cameras is they are battery powered, yep battery powered for over a year. They record a segment of time after a movement in front of them. What I don’t like about them is the segment may occur a full 5 seconds after a movement is seen. (That can be a long time)
Our current cameras record 24/7 so every second of an event is recorded. The trouble with them is that they are being retired.
This is a trustworthy camera. It’s only 2Mpixel, but i don’t need to see their face since it is probably covered anyway. I’ll run these Amcrest cameras in parallel with the D-Link cameras until i am comfortable they can do the job. I am a little worried about the DNR part of the system. A DNR is a couple hundred bucks and so is a ASUSTOR.
I ordered a couple white cameras too.
I have one silver camera, the silver 2M ones are not available on Amazon anymore.
Narrative: I spent most of the morning drinking our wonderful coffee from Santo Domingo. Oh, and I spent a good deal of time thinking about the network in Nevada.
Home networks tend to be flat, everything touches everything else and wireless networking has access to everything! Another way of securing your home network is thinking about what things HAVE to touch to be functional. Then divide the network between those things that don’t have to talk to each other directly. Then write out what things should communicate with other things in a chart like the one above so that you can build firewall rules to protect everything.
I was looking to bring one of them to Nevada, but then I found out they were terribly OLD and unsupported since 2019. Even the newer NAS I purchased DNS-320 Share Center is also out of date and vulnerable
I just happened to have purchased a 4 disk ASUSTOR NAS for my home network a month ago.
First thing i noticed is that it is terribly fast, at least compared to my D-Link 321 boxes. It also is more like a cell phone with all the apps you can add to the device.
I searched Amazon for a product to replace all four of them and I’ve decided to get a ASUSTOR 2disk NAS for Nevada.
Every camera is still working after more than two weeks.
Narrative: I missed two days writing in my Blog, i was terribly busy getting ready for church. They have moved their auditorium to completely wireless and we don’t have the transmitters to reach them. So we’re tying in to the old wiring with a board we’ve brought. It turned out to be confusing on which channel was going to be in the monitors. (I hadn’t thought that through!)
I’ve spent almost all morning creating drawings for next Sunday so that I’ll have a better handle on it next time. Like the outdoor services, we’ve not done it the same way twice!
We’re wanting to add storage to our network in Nevada. The trouble with that thought is that we don’t want old cameras and our network storage to be on the same network. In fact it’s a good idea to have the computers on a different network. I can create the network from here on the firewall.
We’re wondering if we can capture some sky images, but the weather doesn’t look promising…
Narrative: Up Supp’n coffee. We need a scanner/printer in Vegas and there’s three decisions with that. First, where should we buy it. Amazon seems to have the cheapest price, but we’ve got to navigate the delivery date so it arrives while we are there. I prefer a hard wired network printer, but it’s also handy to have wireless. The decision on that one is that we can use the house wireless and connect the printer hard wired. The M428fdn looks like it would fit nicely.
We’re going to need storage for the scanned documents. We could use a flash/USB drive on the laptop, but that can’t be shared easily. We could use a NAS on the network, but that has wireless access to PII. We could use cloud storage, but that is limited to 5Mbits upload. Balancing security, speed and access.
Narrative: I am up really early and I have a little time to catch up on my blog. I’ve sent a message to a newspaper asking them why can’t the republicans in Texas let the voters decide for the districts that the Democrats who left the state? Give the vote back to the people, they are supposed to be representing their desires anyway.
I spent the morning working on getting our medications for the next trip. We had an issue where the pharmacy changed our prescription to a generic and the Doctor and the pharmacy were talking about two different drugs and they refused to refill our prescription in 6 weeks of trying. We asked for the Supervisor and she found the problem in 2 minutes.
We spent a good deal of the day discussing our next trip. I checked the two older 48V battery banks and they were down to 50 volts. (12.5/Battery) I put two 48V banks on one solar charger and the other two banks on the 2nd solar charger to keep them topped off.
I updated the three Raspberry Pi’s in Nevada and did several speed tests. The Internet performance is much better than it was when we were out there last month
Narrative: I didn’t get up very early this morning and I have a rendezvous this morning at 9AM with a friend to make some cables for me. I checked the lawn first thing this morning for progress on the Weed+Feed that I put out last night. There was no grains of the product left on the leaves. (It must have rained.) That’s good and bad, i wanted enough moisture to carry the product into the plan but not enough to wash the product off the leaves?
Word Press notified me that https is now enabled for my website! Cool! That will protect my passwords to the website and my blog.
The skin doc said that the lesions are nothing to worry about, he froze them without taking a biopsy.
We had church service in the evening and we called it a day.
