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War Driving Version 2.0

Posted by timothy on from the community-access-television dept.

asv108 writes: "There is an interesting article in the New York Times about the popularity of wireless cameras from X10 and how easy it is to easedrop on the feeds with relatively inexpensive equipment from up to a 1/4 mile away." I wonder if they're doing the things the X10 ads imply they might be doing.

2 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Re:For a good time... by dr_labrat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Soooo, for those of us not in the states, or too lazy to pick up a fone... WTF is it?

    --
    The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
  2. Re:Ooooh, scary by dsoltesz · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Well, we picked up a set of X10's that were coming with the rotating base. Our purpose was to transmit goofy "web cam" and home monitoring stuff -- video of the bird feeders, the dogs in the backyard (we're curious what they do all day to entertain themselves you see), spy on the cats (how in the hell did they get up there?), and as a cheap image capture for the telescope. It hadn't occurred to us the phone was also running at 2.4 GHz, which interfered with the picture. We unplugged the phone, played for a while, then packed everything up and sent it all back -- we weren't about to give up this particular phone in order to keep the cameras :-D

    I thought the system was worth the $250 bucks or so -- four cameras, robotic base, and other accessories. The images were acceptably clear, there's an interesting selection of cameras available, and the robotic base runs very smoothly and quietly. A decent web cam ususally runs around $50 or $60, so I thought it was worth the money.

    Actually, the robotic base is what pushed us over the edge to finally buy a package. We were looking for a cheaper alternative to the $2500 and up price tags we were finding for such things. Even though the set up didn't work for our house, we think using them at work to "monitor" things like the computer rooms, printers, etc. would be handy. Printers and plotters in particular -- some folks in other buildings waste a lot of time walking across campus checking up on their prints.