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High Tech Baby Monitoring?
MrGibbage writes "I'm a long time geek and about to be a first time father. I'm setting up the baby room now, and I'm looking for a high-tech (and low cost of course) baby monitoring system. I'm already running a linux web server over DSL and I'd love to push the video to that in order to see the video on my cell phone when we are out and the babysitter is home....uhh....babysitting. How will I watch the video while in our house? What about on my iPaq? Laptop? Something else? What about audio? Any systems that integrate both? The Baby-R-Us systems are ridiculously low quality and not expandable at all and therefore not really an option. The last slashdot article about video surveillance is a few years old."
This isn't specifically for monitoring, but it is (somewhat) high tech and related to children. Seems like an interesting item... The device that rocks the cradle
Nokia do a camera that will MMS you the picture it is looking at on demand. Setting up a box with a motion detecting camera is very simple and your only real challenge when streaming it to a mobile is network speed and transcoding.
Best bet is to get dedicated hardware if you want to do this stuff as what you are after is taking a raw MPEG-2 stream in, performing real-time transcoding to less picture quality and then steaming that in real-time over a different protocol. You can do it on a decent server, but why bother when you can pick up decent video cards pretty cheaply these days (not GAMES cards, VIDEO cards, ones with hardware encoders). Or a shitty Web-cam quality is all you can hope for (and you'd probably still need to re-code).
Of course you then have the security challenge of making sure that anyone else can't see in as well (Mr Burglar looks "hey everyone is out"), which means having some form of VPN from your mobile, again these exist but you are getting more complex and expensive.
Beyond there you have the legislative problems of spying on your babysitter (you'd have to tell her or go to court and be rightly sued for invasion of privacy).
I'd just go for the Nokia camera, tell the baby sitter, only put it in the kids rooms (do you care if the babysitter is on the phone or if the kids are okay ?). The rest is very very sad overkill, and if you are going that far surely you'd want RF-ID tags on the kids with biometric sensors and a constant stream of data to go along with the video feed.
So option 1 means - Nokia Camera + MMS capable mobile phone and telling the baby sitter
Option 2 means - you are a sad geek liable to end up in court.
Option 3 means - you really really need help, like now.
Personally I wouldn't trust my kids with someone I felt I had to spy on.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I would recommend taking a look into using a VNC package. Basically it will let you see and control what's going on with your computer (the one controlling the baby monitor/webcam) from your iPaq, laptop, and even a Treo phone!
Basically all you would be doing is opening up a webcam viewer on the computer through VNC and just watch the screen... You won't be getting super fast resolution (depending on speed of connection and machine running the client you'll be looking at around 5 FPS I think) but you will be able to see what's going on. Good luck, and congrats...
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
Extrapolation from my fairly recent experience: "...and thus am currently dreaming up all sorts of over the top schemes to monitor the baby."
Reality from my experience: forget it. A radio baby monitor is enough, in fact after a while we stopped using even that because our own ears sufficed just as well. The only over the top thing I actually implemented was using a camcorder's nightshot capability to see if the baby was actually asleep - allowed me to do it without going in the room and waking her up. Even that stopped after about two months.
You won't be able to of course, and this advise will be impossible for you to take but, but...relax. Really. You'll have enough genuine stress from crying etc. without also rigging up monitoring systems which you'll barely use. If the baby is crying at night, check on it (sorry - don't know him/her in your case). If the baby isn't crying at night - leave it alone! If you need a monitoring system for during the day, you're slacking offf - should be giving the baby personal attention of some kind (yourself, your other half, a nursery...).
Honestly - all these things sounded like a great idea to me at the time as well, but come the actual events I just abandoned them as not worthwhile. My own experience? I'm a father of two - one daughter who will be three in January, one son who will be one in a week's time. Hectic does not begin to describe the first few months of both my daugter's life but even more so my son's (when we had the both of them to look afteR), but you do work out a pattern eventually.
Cheers,
Ian
My wife and I decided (against the grain) not to install any kind of baby monitoring devices, hi-tech or otherwise. All our friends did. We slept, they didn't. They worried, we didn't. Maybe we are just laid back, but we never spent an entire evening checking the baby monitor for functionality, as a friend once did!
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
The baby monitor I use has a "your baby isn't breathing" alarm.
This means that I can totally relax unless the alarm is ringing.
I don't need to hear anything coming out of the monitor if the alarm is silent.
This has given me great peace of mind and helped me relax no end.
As long as SIDS is largely unexplained, these monitors will be of great value.
But I certainly agree with other comments that remote web monitoring is not the way to go here.
Have you thought about trying good old fashioned parenting? Perhaps "being there" is the best way to monitor your child...
How the heck is this Insightful? This is the best way to end your marriage. You need to get out once a week with your spouse, and you'll need someone to watch your kid when you go out.
If you have relatives in the area, they make the best babysitters. You know them, plus they probably want to see the kid as much as they can without imposing on you.
A friend of mine reports that her dog has been doing the job quite well. When the baby needs something the dog barks then goes an gets mom to go look after the funny looking "puppy". She didn't train the dog for this, he just took on the job.
I skiped the whole thing and started with step kids who are already teens.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
You co-sleep until they can roll over on their own (that's when risk of SIDS goes down considerably). I slept with my daughter in the crook of my arm (lying in bed of course) for about the first 6 months. Not to mention I didn't have to get up out of bed to breastfeed her. She's 21 months and transitioned great to a toddler bed a couple months ago.
We've adopted the practice of entering into a contract with our sitter for 1 years worth of babysitting, 1 night a week. We pay her upfront so she has enough cash in hand to buy something decent, like a powerbook.
She's happy with the lump sum payment, and we get a for-sure babysitter for 1 year.
Even better, start trading babysitting with other parents in your neighborhood. They're in the same boat as you, and it's nice for either mom or dad to go over & watch someone else's tv for an evening. Then you go out & one of them comes over. It's great because it's free, and particularly because other parents are more geared up to especcially young kids. If a baby wakes up and is inconsolable, a parent will bow to the inevitable and give you a call rather than being afraid of being a failure like a teenager might. We've worked it on a quid pro quo basis with a few people, and also expanded it a bit recently using babysitterexchange.com (it's free & run by parents, so you can't complain too much that it's IE only & sometimes is down).
On the high tech side, I'd say you don't really need much but whatever you decide to do, get it done before junior arrives because you sure won't have time afterwards... I'd get one of the Phillips rechargeable baby monitors & leave it at that.
I have one 3 channel modulator, and one single channel modulator. Channel 88 is the driveway, 90 is the front door, 92 is our daughter's room, and 100 is the Tivo.
Having a camera in the child's room is quite handy, and is good for some humor once in a while (young children sleep really strange at times). I am going to add infrared lighting to her camera soon, as she's transitioned to a toddler bed now and it would be nice to see if she's on the floor or not.
> From your post I take it your not a parent?
I am the AC you are replying to. And I am a parent (two boys, 6 and 5).
The problem is that probably half of the submiter friends have no children, and he must be carefull not to piss them off. Like you and I been pissed by our friends that had children before we had...
I was very careful about that after having my childs, and managed to keep mostly intact my relations with childless people (that, btw, tends to be much more interesting than one with child, as those generally don't know what to talk about, beside their progeniture...)
As for baby monitoring, my family never had a baby monitor while I was growing up, but then again, my mother was a housemom. While in the house, she could hear us crying, and if she was going to be out of earshot (in the basement doing laundry or outside), she'd take us with her.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
My sister has something like this.
It monitors the baby's movement (even breathing while sleeping). If there's no movement for 20 seconds, it'll sound an alarm. That could provide some peace of mind.
and the closest he's come to geeking out is to leave the store-bought receiver upstairs for his wife. He can work down in the basement and listen to the baby monitor with his own RF equipment.
:)
As a software engineer, I know better than to muck with Proggoddess 2.0 while her system is rebooting.
For us, the storebought audio-only monitor was good enough. It is so sensitive, it can pick up the birds and crickets chirping outside when the windows are closed. We pretty much stopped using it after the 3rd month as our little screaming alarm clock is loud enough now at 6 months.
--The Programming goddess from Gorflaz
There's one theory that says that SIDS is caused by fumes from the mattress, and a New Zealand company invented some sort of mattress wrap (sorry I don't have the link) that supposedly there were NO cases of SIDS with babies on mattresses wrapped in this stuff.
Therefore the theory is that if the baby is sleeping on the back, then they aren't inhaling the fumes. I don't know if there's merit to that idea, but it's an interesting thought.
SIDS is also a rather generic term that they use, "Sudden Infant Death Syndrome", if they don't know the cause of the baby's death.
Also of note is that SIDS is virtually unheard of in countries where the infants routinely sleep with their parents (and they laugh like you're insane if you suggest that the parent might roll over on or smother the baby), as well as in countries where they don't use standard mattresses, but mattresses stuffed with natural materials.
I bought a 1.2ghz (no interference with wifi) pinhole camera on ebay together with a receiver that I then plug into a composite-to-firewire converter. Quality is low but it more or less does the job, except that it doesn't cover every corner of the room and we have a toddler. It needs good light. I could have instead opted for an IR cam instead for a little bit more. If I want to (say to monitor from a laptop), I can have the desktop the receiver is plugged into serve up the video online.
It cost me $45 for the camera/receiver, which is less than the video baby monitors they sell (except those come with little TV screens, but a lot of them are 2.4ghz which is not acceptable in my setting).
It's not to watch the baby sitter. We don't even have a baby sitter yet. Heck, we don't even have a baby yet. Anyway, how are the X10's in low light? Anyone actually buy one? Anyone willing to admit it? I almost think I'd be too embarassed to buy one only because of their advertising.
First, I only pose this challenge to those who feel it necessary to not just question my decision but to INSIST that I'm wrong, going to change my mind or wickedly selfish for not having children. Given that context, especially the accusation that remaining childless is ultimately selfish, the challenge stands as far as I'm concerned. While I stated that the desire to have children is selfish, I didn't say (or at least didn't mean to) that selfishness was a bad thing.
Personally, I think both situtations are driven by the selfish nature of pretty much everyone and that these forms of selfishness are morally neutral. The challenge is posed, not to paint having children as the MORE selfish decision or to malign that decision, but rather to point out that both are driven by selfishness (and as such, insisting that I have some higher mandate to breed should cease).
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
I agree, anyone who would even consider leaving their child alone for even a second should be at the top of CPS's hit list. Gonna cook, have the kid with you, or move the kitchen appliances into the kids room.
;-) But if they're asleep in bed, you just have to get more creative with locations (office chairs are interesting). I mean, geez, having sex in the same place *all* the time gets boring! This is why young kids go to bed at 8 or 9...
Wear the kid on your back, once they're old enough (can sit up on their own). Until then, set up the Kick & Play in the kitchen.
Hafta poop, take the kid with you, or have a commode put in the kids room, or better yet, bond with the kid by wearing diapers yourself.
Diapers are passé. Yes, take the kid with you, that way they can realize that mommy and daddy do it *this* way. Take them to the potty when they need it, too, as soon as you can (we started at two weeks). That way you never have the struggle of potty training... they just get better at controlling it, and letting you know they need the bathroom... until one day they can just go by themselves. (This method usually sees them "graduated" around 18-24 months... more work for a lot of that time, but beats diapering a 3-year-old.)
I'm sure your employer won't mind you taking 18years of maternity/paternity leave.
Duh, you just take them *with* you to work. Or come up with a new job and work from home.
Wanna have some, uh, intimate time with your SO, do it right there. Junior will be two young and out of it to really grasp what's going on anyway (that and like your likely to get any anytime soon after just having a kid, yeah right).
Oh, you get a little bit in.
You were being facetious, but there really is a school of parenting that basically keeps the baby with you all the time. And it's not totally impractical to do and still have a life... in fact, it's *easier* to have a life if you are comfortable bringing the baby with you into it. My husband and I go to movies, eat out, visit with friends, etc. and take our son with us... he's in a sling or wrap, so he's cozy and more inclined to sleep than if he's isolated in a stroller, and we pick environments/times/activities that are more "baby friendly" (i.e. restaurants with a high noise quotient, underpopulated matinee movies, etc.)
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?