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.