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Get a dog (or a goose)! It might prevent anything untoward happening. All cameras do is give you a probably useless picture of someone who'll never get arrested after it's happened!
I am not a number. I am a ... no, wait!
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For some perverse reason, I've always been rather fond of the sign that simply reads:
Trespassers will be shot on sight.
Survivors will be shot again.
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Kevin Marois wrote: Needs to be less than $200.
Good luck with that. But for not too much more - $299 or so - you can find something usable. I have a 4 camera IP system from QC that produces great pictures and cost very little. Unfortunately, it's made in China and the instructions are entirely unusable. Getting it to work at all has been by trial and error, but I've never managed to get their remote viewing software to work.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Roger Wright wrote: ... it's made in China ...
So that means you are probably not the only one who is viewing it remotely, right?
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More likely is that I'm the only one who can't.
Will Rogers never met me.
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My home security system is very low tech. I call it Dogs-n-Guns. It's really simple - dogs are used for the alert portion of the system, and guns are used for conflict resolution.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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I used a Raspberry Pi with an old Microsoft USB webcam I had in my drawer. I mounted the webcam in one of these weatherproof enclosures so it would be fine outside:
Enclosure
This software works really well to drive the camera and even has motion detection:
MotionEyeOS
The software lets you set how long you want it to keep recordings, depending on how much memory is on your micro SD card.
To view it remotely, you have to set up port forwarding on your home router to the Raspberry Pi. Once this is set up, you can even see it using your phone's browser, which is so much easier than commercial products that require you to install a buggy app.
The only crummy thing is that the webcam doesn't have infrared, so you don't see much at night, but honestly I couldn't see much of anything when we had a commercial camera that did have infrared.
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Want something close to enterprise grade?
Try ZoneMinder...
Seriously - one could package this product into a 1U server case and build a small business around it if they were so inclined (most likely, somebody has).
Once set up, it can be used to control and record from nearly any kind of camera you can throw at it - including high-end PTZ security cams. Each camera can have assigned to it multiple motion detection filters, each covering the whole image - or only parts of it (so you could, in effect, have a camera monitoring an area with low, medium, and high-risk areas - with each filter covering just that area on the image).
When a filter is triggered - you can have the system take multiple actions - from simply storing the image, to a video (including time before trigger and after), to ftp'ing that video somewhere, sending it to your phone, storing it remotely on dropbox - you name it, it can be done.
Oh - do you want it run a special script, too - perhaps something that trips a relay to turn on your alarm system (or a bear spray cannon?) - go for it!
How many cameras can it support? How beefy is the computer system it is running on?
I currently have mine set up to record from a few wireless IP cameras around my house - nothing fancy. It's running on a 1 GHz P4 with 768M of RAM, and dual 400 GB PATA drives - in other words, a junk box. I've had it running for a few years now, and it handles everything just fine. I could probably add a couple more cameras and still be ok. I have it email the triggered photos/video to me via gmail (so I can look at it from anywhere if needed - but my phone is with me most of the time).
It has a web-based interface that (in theory - with the right firewall and other protections in place) you could view and use from anywhere, but I just use it on my local network. The whole system is written in Python, and uses a ton of standard linux libraries for the video and other parts (mainly video4linux - opencv might be in there too, not sure). You can have it monitor USB cameras, firewire cameras, IP cameras, video capture cards, etc - basically, if you can get it to work with video4linux, you can get it to monitor it.
Capture from my IP cameras is done using MJPEG capture; it grabs the stream, analyzes each frame, and when it triggers, starts to save things. It keeps a running buffer (adjustable) of "before the trigger" so that if you want, you can save and keep the video of what led up to the trigger. Data is stored in a MySQL database, but (IIRC) the video and images are stored directly on-disk.
Anyhow - check it out. It's completely open-source, and has been around for a long time. Again, I consider it to be above and beyond consumer grade - but as such, it has a lot of options to tweak to get it set up "just right", and the learning curve isn't "flat". It goes well beyond "well, something changed in this picture - better trigger" to "hmm - over here a big blob changed, but lets ignore these swaying branches". Of course, anything in between and more is possible. I've only barely scratched the surface on my install, to be honest.
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Not a coding question... A survey
I'm curious how many people use GalaSoft Mssenger[^] in their apps.
I've always thought that using these types of "relay messaging" tools lead to hard to debug apps and usually indicate some kind of design problem.
Anyone have any thoughts on it?
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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Message from where to where?
It is a tedious read, and I'm not gonna dig through that entire article to understand what it should do.
If it is inter-app communication, then it is a wrong design. If it is communicating logging to "home", then it might be a privacy-issue.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Yes, it's an inter-app communication thing.
You commented that it's wrong. Please explain why you feel that way.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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Kevin Marois wrote: You commented that it's wrong. Please explain why you feel that way.
It is a "GOTO" in disguise; your app send of a WM_MESSAGE and you're off hunting where that is consumed.
Sorry, but the messenger-idea is a solution is search of a problem; there's more efficient ways of inter-app communication, and they have been around for some time.
In the rare case where multiple machines need to communicate over the internet, I'd opt for my own sockets; even XMPP would be preferable to a "new" solution, as it limits my dependencies - there would be enough alternatives if the provider of the solution goes belly up.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Eddy Vluggen wrote there's more efficient ways of inter-app communication
Such as?
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: there's more efficient ways of inter-app communication, and they have been around for some time.
I've been working on an app that uses SignalR. Do you think this would be a good way to handle inter-proc commincations?
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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Kevin Marois wrote: I've been working on an app that uses SignalR. Do you think this would be a good way to handle inter-proc commincations?
I can't say, I haven't used it in a real scenario yet.
Their website however states;
ASP.NET SignalR is a new library for ASP.NET developers that makes developing real-time web functionality easy Windows is not a real-time OS. Meaning a library on IIS, piped through ASP.NET, utilizing something else on top of that, is not in my definition of "real time".
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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There seems to be a misunderstanding from Kevin here. The Messenger implementation of Laurent's is intended for communication inside a single application. It's not inter-app communication.
This space for rent
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No, I get it. I've used it in a large scale app before. That's why I mentioned that I thought it could be hard to debug when to classes are firing messages back and forth. I'm just curious about how else this could be done in a simpler manner.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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"Inside" the application? A real (desktop) application, or a "webby" or "phoney" app?
Delegates? How about an observer-pattern? Windows messages? Mutexes? Which of those is the library itself using? 
To put it in Garfield-terms; "what's in it for me?", what do I gain by adding the dependency to this library?
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Disclaimer: Laurent is a friend of mine, so I might have some bias here.
Messenger/Mediator style communications are perfectly fine because they allow you to separate classes, sometimes over different assemblies, whereby you don't have to know where you're getting a message from, just that at some point, you might (or might not) receive a particular message. This is a perfectly valid way of decoupling classes. What you have to watch out for is something called message explosion, whereby you send everything that you can possibly think of over a messenger. If you're doing that, there should generally be other ways to do this.
BTW - if you're using MVVM Light, that's where the Messenger is.
This space for rent
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I've used it before and I do like it. However I found that it leads to hard to debug code, especially if more than one process fires the same message concurrently. I've also seen apps that fire a message from class A to Class B, which then fires another message back to Class A. very hard to follow.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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if no, what alternatives do you use?
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Fitted with GPS (Gloopy Pigeon Sh*t)
This space for rent
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A pigeon is a rat with wings. Before being the trash collectors (I mean until 18th century), they were very very fine dishes, but now ... 
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