In Use

Figure 6 shows the basic camera-management screen. The screen shows both the inside camera, which is pointing out my front window, and the outside camera, which is sitting on my back porch.

Figure 6: Camera Application (click image to enlarge)

Note that the screen provides space for up to six cameras. You can arrange the screen in various ways such as sizing it so that one camera takes up the entire space or evenly dividing up the space between the cameras, and so on. Both outside and inside cameras have a maximum resolution of 640 x 480 and were advertised to deliver up to 15 fps (frames per second) of live video.

The Werks application is the heart of the surveillance system and must be running at all times in order to manage, monitor, and record. If you are not actively monitoring your cameras, the application can be hidden, so that it still runs in the background to monitor and record. Figure 7 shows the Setup Camera screen where you can define camera attributes such as label, color, and position.

Figure 7: Label Setup (click image to enlarge)

Change-detection is an important feature for these types of security monitoring cameras, since you don't want to always watch your cameras. Most of the time, you want to be notified or alerted when something unusual occurs. The Werks application provides a fairly sophisticated change-detection capability. Figure 8 shows the Recording Setup screen where you can set up motion detection for each camera individually. From Recording Setup, you can define how much change is relevant and mask out which portions of the camera to monitor for change.

Figure 8: Change Detection Setup (click image to enlarge)

You can define up to 16 "zones" for each camera, which is useful when you want to eliminate and restrict detection in areas. For example, Figure 8 shows the picture for "C1 Driveway (Live)" with three cyan-bordered rectangular areas where I wanted to eliminate detection because I wanted to restrict the change monitoring to only my driveway. When a change is detected, the video of the event is recorded to your hard drive for later review. During the application setup, I allocated a fixed amount of disk space for video recordings. When the allocated space is exceeded, old recordings are deleted.

Tags: HomePlug, LukWerks, Network camera, powerline, WiLife,

Related Articles: