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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."
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...
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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.
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That's a terrible device. A newborn that cries always has a reason to cry. Even being lonely is a good reason for a newborn. (and once they're out of the newborn stage, they're too big for that cradle, so we're talking newborns here).
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.
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.
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.