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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."
story author probably wants to spy on his neighbor's teenage daughter(s).
I'd like to see the video of your babysitter after you're gone too....
I'm sure we'll see it as a mpg on the newsgroups very soon....
WTF? Over?
to start teaching your baby about the PATRIOT Act :P
Monstar L
If you start watching the baby on your video-phone, you'll get unhealthily paranoid. Select a baby-sitter you trust, and relax a bit. You'll have enough stress with a new kid as it is - you'll need to learn to let go when it's sleeping.
Human infants are quite good (admittedly not perfect) at not dying when left alone when sleeping.
Ydco co
Have you thought about trying good old fashioned parenting? Perhaps "being there" is the best way to monitor your child...
Honestly, your biggest problem at this point will be getting enough sleep. everything else will be likely be lovely.
As far as I'm concerned baby monitoring is pointless, it merely increases paranoia and stress.
Each time the baby isn't coughing/crying/breathing heavily, it induces fear there is something wrong.
Each time the baby is coughing/crying/breathing heavily, it induces fear there is something wrong.
Surprisingly, babies are fairly dependable to continue existing without constant monitoring. Rather unsurprisingly, it takes a huge amount of energy for constant monitoring by adults.
Oh, sorry, I thought you said low tech, high cost...
try ww.com, it will give you software and a page to watch your kid and a jpg you can poll with your cellphone...
MP3 Search Engine
What I do is have the camera takes shots every 10 sec or so, and save to a static file. VisionGS does a great job with this.
After that, just make as lightweight of a autorefreshing page as possible, and then you can just point your phone browser to it. It works very well actually, and VisionGS can archive the shots, so you can have a record or what went on.
--sig fault--
D-Link has some cameras with integrated webservers with a self loading java interface viewable from most browsers. You can even tell it to send you an email or upload shots to an ftp server. cost ~$130.
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 demand a new topic to be immediately made under 'Your rights online' section so we can discuss it through and blame Bill Gates for it.
-el
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...
Pool covers, railings and common sense help to keep your kids alive.
liqbase
Hey, most likely if you're a 'hands-on' type of daddy, you'll want to spend the miniscule amounts of spare time that you'll have on your digital baby videos, rather than worrying about baby monitoring. After a couple of months, it's a full time job.
Have fun!
Try RFID Implants. You can get the sensors at radio shack and the implants themselves are real cheap if you go through your veterinarian.
First off I will preface this with the disclaimer that I don't have kids, nor do my wife (of many years) and I ever intend to have kids...
I say skip the geek-tools baby raising. Everyone I know who *has* had kids and taken some obsessive-compulsive child-rearing tactic has ended up in a near nervous breakdown with no life of their own.
If you can't find a reputale local babysitter with references, then leave the kid in the care of a familiy member when you go out. I don't think that staring at 2" square grainy image of the kid in a crib is going to make your evening out all that enjoyable.
If you must have video surveilance, go to http://www.supercircuits.com for the video cameras. Then go to http://www.worthdist.com and get a ChannelPlus channel modulator. This allows you to put the video camera feed(s) on TV channels, so for example you tune any TV to channel 84 and there is the crib (at my house channel 84 is the driveway camera, but I digress.)
-This sig intentionally left blank
A Friend who I work with has one of these wireless video baby monitors.... And he himself has said, you end up repeatedly running to the nursery 'cause it looks as if the babies far too still when viewed on the little LCD display.
;-) (just kidding - honest!).
So, I guess what would be useful is a button on the monitor, that when pressed will give the baby just a little electric shock, to cause the child to move or flinch enough to be seen over the LCD
A lot of people are making a lot of money off parents with exaggerated fears for their children's safety. Bike helmets are a reasonable precaution, but stab-resistant jackets? As the father of a one-year old, I would suggest you spend your limited free time checking the batteries on the fire alarms and ensuring you and your wife still have fun now and then rather than tinkering around with baby monitors. Both will serve your child better in the long run.
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
Just install Linux on the baby and then you can monitor it with SNMP.
And if there's anything wrong, you can ssh in.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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.
1. Take a wild stab and enter http://www.sids.org into your favorite browser.
2. Look at the sidebar that has a section labeled Reducing the Risk".
3. Read and digest, particularly the bit at the bottom that discusses home monitoring systems (apnea/bradycardia monitors). Consider that there are thousands of experts in the medical and electronic fields who've been working on this exact problem for years.
Seriously, when it comes to a baby, play it safe. If you can think of it and it can be done, there's likely an entire industry that's already designed the tool to do it properly.
Before you start videotaping a third person (a babysitter), shouldn't you check what laws in your area might apply to such monitoring?
Please, what happened? Whats this obsession with monitoring these days? When i was a baby, there were no baby alarms or no cameras (?!?). Please do not monitor your babies with cameras feeding a stream over the internet for the love of all that is sacred. The idea alone makes me sick. It will not make you more safe, it will make you more nervous. Get a good babysitter you can trust, and go out, relax. You need it from time to time, after having a baby. Dont keep yourself at a constant level of stress monitoring your child 24/7. Whats next? Giving your baby a GPS tag? RFID chip? Its all an excuse nowadays. Just bring up your child like you was. You turned out alright i suppose?
There are not very many video systems that handle dark rooms very well - and those that do are not cheap. I would suggest you stick to audio. Just make sure the audio system is dect or similar http://www.bt.com/babymonitor/ . Old analogue baby monitors are completely pointless.
But I certainly agree with other comments that remote web monitoring is not the way to go here.
Zoneminder. Has all the options you want (cellphone monitoring etc), and has motion detection and auto record features.
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).
I pity you. Children are an incredible joy, but they aren't for the selfish. You need to give a lot of yourself to your family but the rewards are awesome!
I have 3, two boys and a girl 5, 3 and almost 1.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Setup a Linux box, connect your webcam, and install a package called "motion" (http://motion.sourceforge.net/). You'll have motion-sensing webcam system that will give you your monitoring capabilities. Also works great as a DIY security system.
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.
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 son is almost 1 - I wrote almost an exactly identical post on a newsgroup before he was born. I tried several alternatives, found that any camera that was reasonably priced was basically worthless, and I finally wound up buying a Summer brand wireless video baby monitor. The thing works FANTASTICALLY. The camera has built in infrared illumination - with the nursery completely dark we can see my son like he's got a spotlight on him, and the mic is so sensitive that if the A/C isn't on you can usually hear him breathing even though the camera's way up on the wall. Since I bought mine, they have now come out with a version that has a small handheld monitoring station rather than the clunky brick-powered unit that I have. The handheld monitor looks like a gameboy. I don't know if the vid is as high quality as the clunky one that I have though. Mine also has a button to turn the video on and off so if you want you can use it as a traditional audio-only baby monitor. I am a classic worrier and this is BY FAR the ABSOLUTELY BEST piece of equipment we bought. It allowed us to put the baby in his room very early on and not worry a bit, not to mention being able to not rush in every time we hear a noise - a quick glance at the monitor tells us he's fine. It also potentially saved his life - he had a reaction to some formula and threw up while going to sleep one time - if my wife hadn't seen it on the monitor we probably would have never noticed and I won't even speculate what might have happened. I also wanted an internet ready camera piped through my web server, forwarded to my cell with motion detection to email me when he moves, etc. but the Summer monitor wound up actually doing a fantastic job.
First as somebody already said, when the baby comes home sleep, more than anything, will be the most important issue for your wife and you. For the first couple of weeks your sleep and especially your wife's sleep will be interrupted. So, the most important strategy is to be able to sleep when the baby sleeps.
If your wife nurses, she will most likely be a wreck for the first month. Nursing is terribly hard on her sleep. You get a break but she takes the pain. Treat her with care.
Here's what we did and it worked out pretty well. From about the age of newborn to about two months, we had the baby in a cradle at night in OUR bedroom. That way, after the first few paranoid nights, we relaxed and slept when the baby allowed. For most babies, gaining to about ten pounds leads to sleeping longer at night and if you are a bit lucky, through the night.
Have a plush chair or another cradle setup for the baby out where you will spend the day. I just put casters on our cradle. During that early time the cradle could go where we wanted to be. The baby wants a lot of holding time. Get one of those sling thingies for the baby to be attached to you. They are great.
After the baby was about 2-3 months s/he did crib time in his/her own bedroom in a regular crib that is good until about the age of 2 years. Around then they get athletic enough and smart enough to climb out. While they are not crawling or scooting around, have a really comfortable chair or something in the babies room that you can snooze in comfortably for those times when the baby is ill and your paranoia is off the scale. DON'T BRING THE BABY IN YOUR BED TO SLEEP after it is out of the cradle. If you must provide additional comfort to the child, you go in there.
When the baby moves into his/her own room, now is the time to install audio monitors. My youngest daughter just put one video cam onto the crib for her newborn son. But both of them found that the problem was not the cam but what to do with the cam data. Sending it to their computers made them feel visually tied to their displays. The idea of sending to a handheld or a phone hasn't come up but I suspect the same outcome. The advantage of the audio is that it can run in the background and not require anything more of you than to clip the receiver on your belt or jeans or skirt, I suppose. So, the video has gotten little use but the audio is very useful.
I could write you a ton more detail but the bottom line is that if the child isn't in your immediate presence and your mental health is important to you and you need some surveillance, audio is the way to go. Remember you're not looking for a high fidelity system just something that lets you hear the baby breathing and moving around. You can get systems from Toys R Us and Babies R Us that will do this job admirably.
If this video thing has come up because you are both returning to work, the remark that somebody made about having a babysitter that you need to surveil may be a problem is right on. Your baby is defenseless and long range surveillance won't be anything but evidence if things go wrong. I just got done doing about 3 years of babysitting my older daughter's kids. These little ones can really test a person's self control. You must have someone you trust enough without the surveillance.
Good luck and best wishes to you and your wife on a wonderful adventure that lies before the two of you.
5,3 and 1 ... funny names for kids ;)
Don't Tell Me What I Can't Do!
The next improvement is to use motion (available on sourceforge) to detect when something is happening, take a few pictures, and mail them to me.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
*ducks*
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Look, there are three qualities that just about any technology has: Good; Fast; Cheap. You get to pick two and it will be the opposite of the third (i.e. if you want it to be good and fast, it won't be cheap). On that note, you aren't going to find anything in the 'under $100' category that is going to be good and 'fast.' If you can spend a little more money, this is what I have set up and they work really well is the Panasonic NetCam: http://www.panasonic.com/consumer_electronics/gate /cameras.asp. I have only used the all-weather flavor and so far am pretty impressed with a $600 out-door camera with as many features as this one has. The indoor camera is much cheaper. You might even be able to find a low-light variant. If you have some more money, Sony makes a camera that has just about every option and is really nice but it costs over twice as much as the Panasonic.
Good luck and congrats!
We actually turn the sound all the way down. Typically the light and the audible cries heard from the room next door (not through the monitor) are enough to wake us. Also, when the audio is turned up if my daughter cries even for a brief moment or makes a peep, my wife wants to immediately rush in. With the audio turned down we still hear the baby, but it makes my wife less anxious. You will have to let your child learn to put him/herself back to sleep. Which bring me to some advice.
There will come a time when you MUST let your child cry it out. At first, yes, your child will wake up every hour- 2 hours for feedings (Conan O'Brien once commented that breast feeding mom's were where most of his viewership was). When our child started on solid food, we let her cry it out. Yes, it is hard at first. There will be an hour plus worth of the worst crying you have ever heard. And it may take a few nights. But then, all of a sudden, your child will sleep through the night. It's as if it were magic. At first, this is unsetteling and you think, "She's not waking up! There must be something wrong!" but you get used to the sweet, sweet sleep you've been missing out on. And SIDS is all but a non-issue once they hit 6 months or are able to turn over. I know there is different schools of thought on getting your baby to sleep through the night. IMHO, I think this is the best way. It teaches them independence. Not dependent on you to help them to go to sleep.
Also, while your wife is on maternity leave, use a basinette or some sleep vessel that will fit in your room. We used ours until she outgrew it. Get one on rollers too so you can move it to different parts of the house.
Be prepared. It's pretty freaky at first. When we came home, we had no help whatsoever (plus the Hospital kicked us out early). It was flu season and my mother-in-law got the flu and all our family members were exposed. The hardest part when we got home was that first few days with all the crying. But you figure it out. It's natural. All these instincts kick in.
Oh and baby blues are real. Just support your wife as best you can. Also, get her this book: The Diaper Diaries: The Real Poop on a New Mom's First Year. It's pretty damn funny. Sure it's cheesy. But you're a dad now. You're no longer cool.
And I second some of what has been said, get out of the house. You probably won't want to the first few months, but around the 4th month, have a relative come over to take care of the kid. You'll call about a half dozen times while you're on your date.
And some of your non-procreating friends will probably stop hanging out with you.
Anyway, I've rambled on too much. Good luck.
----
Spam subject of the moment: Offshore account secrets -nashville disrupt
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dorgem/
Has the built-in web server, or will upload to FTP, and can save frames to a .avi archive for review later. Works with any video for windows compatible source (basically any cam that works with windows, including my GeForce video card's video in jack), and the author is continually updating it.
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
If you are going to have outsiders work in your home, get fvcking COMFORTABLE with watching them.
Security does not mean paranoia, but monitoring is perfectly legitimate.
Except when it is your boss monitoring you at work. I understand that a baby is different than a computer or a 3 million dollar digimahookey that you work on.
But really where can anybody draw the line between "security" and "privacy".
If you are going to monitor your baby make sure the babysitter knows. They may be offended and not watch the baby, but I think it is their right to decide whether they want to be watched also.
Can you ping me now?... Good!
I am childless by choice and have always puzzled at statements that having a child is a selfless act (not to pick on you directly, but you did mention selfishness in your post). The reason is this. A few years ago, I started challenging those who insisted that I should have children (and they do. at great length.) to give me the reasons THEY had children. However, in those reasons, they need to avoid using the first person. No "I", "me", "us", etc. MANY parents have a really hard time coming up with any.
While taking care of the child once it arrives may be selfless, the reasons for choosing to have them in the first place are almost always centered around the parent rather than the child.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
When your wife says "We need to check on the kids before we go to bed..." she actually means "You need to go check on the kids...". Don't get it wrong like I did, you will never hear the end if, especially if she breast feed the babies.
Skip the gadgets, you won't use them. A good quality audio monitor is all you will need and that will be overkill most of the time.
A low quality audio monitor may provide with entertainment from neighbor hood. Ours picked up the guy next doors phone conversation with his lover. Nice guy but more info than I ever wanted to know about him and his friend.
Agreed.
It is totally YOUR business to have kids or not. I was replying to the parent who sounded very disturbed at the thought of raising kids. I feel for him and his spouse. (That's where the selfishness came in.) If he "got her pregnant", IMHO, be a man and step up. Be the best husband you can be and support your wife. Once he see's his child his views may very well change. It's one of those things that's impossible to decribe without actually doing it. To hear a baby call you daddy or come over and give you a hug can be pretty special.
It is a big committment to raise kids and not all people want to or are up to it. I repect that and people shouldn't be giving you a hard time. God knows there are enough unwanted kids out there as it is.
It's often sad to see how many people "think they know best" and try and meddle in other peoples lives. You have your life, I have mine, and we are free to do whatever we want with it. It's really nobody else's business.. (though I do understand an eager grand-parent to be) ;-)
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Congratulations, I think the MOST selfless thing is to recognize that you don't want children and then not have them. Having a child "just because there was nothing else to do" is incredibly selfish. However, if by accident, you do become a parent, you HAVE to give as much as possible to your child, or risk life-long problems for them (and for you, too).
I like practically all of axis's equipment and they are not hideously priced on ebay
There is too much stupid joking lately. Look at the beginning of most stories. Maybe 5 or 10 people are making adolescent jokes. Not only do they join every story to act like adolescents, they act like socially-challenged adolescents.
High-tech security is a valuable subject, no matter what is being monitored. Someone asks an interesting question, and a few immature people attack the author of the question!
I came here hoping that someone else had already done the engineering, and I could learn from that, and a few people waste my time.
--
Bush: Borrowing money to give to the rich.
Maybe we should just tell him he can't do that with a linux system.
It seems like everybody wants to tell him how to raise the kid instead of how to solve the technical problem
I was really interested in some answers to this.
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.
Like you, I was looking for a monitoring system better than the usual 49 Mhz analog domestic-problem broadcast units out there (a 2.4Ghz DSS phone is $50, a 49Mhz analog baby monitor is $50 -- what's wrong with this picture?).
I looked and looked for DSS monitors in *any* band and couldn't find them. They're all analog (easy eavesdropping) for some reason, but you can get them in all the mobile phone bands.
I ended up buying a Mobi video monitor from SmartHome.com. It's 2.4Ghz analog, but has audio + color video.
The camera has an IR LED array and can be set to "night" mode and does a very good job of illuminating a crib or bassinette in even total darkness. The camera lens swivels up and down and is a fixed-focus lens that provides a surprisingly good image. The unit includes a mounting system with 2 brackets.
The receiver uses a tiny LCD video display (2.5" diagnoal) that's visible in most lighting situations; a 4-5 step contrast adjustment is available. The receiver has an AV out cable (via 4-conductor mini-headphone jack) that breaks out into L/R and composite video (external video looks really good on my 42" TV). The receiver also has a "level" setting that disables the LCD display until a sound from the camera goes above the approximate setting of "LEVEL". Audio is maintained during this no-video-display monitoring. Reception is decent in my 2000 sq ft, 2 level house (I have no Wifi).
Both units can run on 4 AAs or through brick-type wall adapters which are included for both units. I had a spare Radio Shaft universal adapter I use with the camera, and the plug was a tight fit in the space provided. The units can be switched between 3 different channels.
Now the downsides:
The camera's lens swivels up and down, but not side to side. Means it must be mounted "dead on" with the crib. I ended up mounting a post to the crib to give the camera sufficient height to show the baby's face, as well as to keep the camera dead-on straight with the crib. I attached the other mounting bracket to a small peice of plywood and bolted that to a small sping clamp for mounting to the basinette. Ugly, but functional.
The switch for the camera is a tiny DIP switch on the bottom (OFF/ON/NIGHT) -- ideally it would be a front-panel ON/OFF with night mode automatically enabled via adjustable photo sensor. An audio sensor that turns on the transmitter might have been a good low-power solution as well -- don't transmit anything unless there's noise.
Reception isn't perfect, and the farther you go the more likely you are to experience jumps in the picture and noise -- it is analog, afterall. Overall it's pretty good.
Battery power on the receiver is limited if you keep the LCD display on. (I found video monitoring easier than audio monitoring -- no room noise, and a better cue as to whether baby is actually awake or not). If you planned on using both units without their PSUs, consider investing in 16 NiMH cells and enough chargers to keep a set constantly under charge.
I have some small concerns about the AC adapter cord. I have mine tie-wrapped to mounts on the back of my crub mount, and high enough that it shouldn't be reachable until the child is maybe 18 months. Any lower and I'd worry about an AC adapter getting put in a mouth.
Right now (baby is 4 weeks on 10/6) it's really of limited value. We have the basinette in our bedroom, so any noise the baby makes we can hear right away. I will flick on the monitor if the baby makes unusual noises just to see, but about 19 times out of 20, we're picking him up for food/change/comfort in about 2 minutes anyway.
I think it will be of more value when the baby is older and sleeps in its crib in another room regularly. I plan to connect the monitor to our bedroom TV (larger picture, etc) and the camera will be fixed in the crib.
I don't do any monitoring, and haven't except when I needed to do work in the garage where I wouldn't hear a cry.
I have found remote control lighting to be of great value however. You won't need it for an infant, but you may value it with a toddler.
My daughter is 3 years now. She is somewhat afraid of the dark (as I was at that age). So I use the remote light, which can be dimmed and I close her door. After a while, when she is asleep, I can silently turn off the light without entering her room and waking her.
She also has a tendancy to wake around 5am quite afraid of the dark. I don't even have to get out of bed--I keep a remote next to my pillow. I just turn on her light and dim it some, and she calms down quickly.
My wife is disabled, and uses the lights to get my attention when we are on opposite ends of the house. I know a lot of people use bells, but we've found the lights work quite nicely. They were also very helpful before she had enough arm strength to reach a light switch.
And yes, I did buy my lights from the most evil of Internet companies, x10.com. I recently discovered that Radio Shack sells rebranded components that are compatible, which is handy when you need another lamp module.
It seems the whole reason for the posting was either the author doesn't trust the babysitter or is worried about the baby. If you watch enough abusive babysitters on tv or with personal experience, you would be anxious too. Additionally...don't come down on parents that want to get out once in a while. It is necessary for the health of the relationship to let your spouse know that you are more than parents to each other. Sitting on the couch gets old...
I've had the Canon VB-C10 point/tilt/zoom networked camera for over a year now and it is the best I've seen anywhere. The quality of the image and zoom capability means that I can check out my whole living room or zoom in on individual fish in my aquarium.
It has an embedded linux system that serves up an applet viewer, so you can use any web browser to connect to it... it's reasonably fast and works well. On my local network it runs 30fps easily.
It's a bit expensive, but I think it's worth it for the peace of mind when travelling, etc.
Pat Niemeyer
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
I also didn't specify, but my challenge to the interrogation came from numerous comments that people not only thought I was doing the wrong thing, but that my (and my wife's) decision to enjoy our life together was wickedly selfish. This led me to ask, if NOT having kids is selfish (as asserted by my challengers), and that's a bad thing, while having kids is a good thing, do these people think that having kids is selfless? That questioning led to my little experiment.
I'm definitely not criticizing anyone for thoughtfully becoming a parent. I agree with your general approach. If, by some failure of modern medicine, we do end up with a child, I will not hesitate to love that child, provide for and parent that child.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
i think a good audio monitor by itself's fine: one with a noise gate on it so you don't hear every rustle - just when (s)he's crying or trying to attract your attention.
i've had a play with wireless cameras and there's two problems: if they don't work in the dark, they're of zero use (you won't be putting them to sleep in a well lit room: or if you are, you won't be doing it for long!) and you *will* be freaked out by the lack of movement.
if you fancy playing, get an old machine and hook up a cheap webcam and run apache on it. network it to your lan and you can try it out and probably learn a bit. you'll probably find you don't need it - although this approach would have the benefit that you could stream it to the web during the day and get baby and childminder/mum to wave at you whilst you're at work.
Actually, few real child development have little against high tech help. A physical therapist who used to strip and has messed up children is not where I would get advice from.
I use the dcs-900 camera. We also use sound via a 900 MHz monitor (Sound is really what I want). While I have been involved with wifi for years (as a start-up company doing wifi), I already had the room wired for networking. Besides, I prefer NOT having peeping toms be able to look in on the camera.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The only trouble is they are rather uncontrollable. When a camera is trapped to the head, the baby will often vary his/her view so you might want some sort of panning mechanism.
The only really good place to hide the battery is of course - the diaper. Believe me you'll have trouble reusing those later! You might want to go with disposables.
Babies, like Daleks, are generaly thwarted by stairs until older so be careful to select a baby with the right level of mobility for the monitoring mission you have in mind.
If you have a particular mark you want monitored try spearning a little strained peas in an inconspicious place so the baby is prone to follow them.
Good luck!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Long time ago I picked up a VEO Observer wireless camera (see http://www.veo.com/ ). I wrote a simple program to extract frames from the camera on a regular basis (see http://www.kahunaburger.com/blog/archives/000100.h tml ) and also wrote a minimal motion detector in perl (see http://www.kahunaburger.com/blog/archives/000114.h tml ) to only capture "interesting" frames. Now that I've decoded the VEO TCP/IP protocol (see http://www.kahunaburger.com/blog/archives/000157.h tml ), I can do all this on my FreeBSD box.
My wife and I have been married for 8 years, and we were enjoying a CF (Child Free for the uninitiated) lifestyle for 6 of those, until the goalie was asleep in the goal and let one in. ;)
We always knew we wanted to be parents "when the time was right," and it took a hiccup of nature to convince us this was the right time. My son is 18 months old, an absolute gem, and my wife is expecting out second (and likely last) child.
I preface with this background because during the time before having children, my wife fell in with some very angry, selfish people that populate Internet message boards. These people's sole purpose was to rant about filthy, dirty "crotch fruits" and how society's child fetish causes them so much grief.
To some degree, I agree with them. Having children is not for everyone in the same way that going to college is not for everyone, being a computer geek is not for everyone, etc. My brother never wants children. My friend and his wife never want children (though she had to spend 5 years shopping OBs until she found one who would do a tubal ligation on a woman under 30). This is a prefectly reasonable point of view, and I definitely recommend enjoying your "selfish" time with your spouse. I doubt my wife and I would have as strong a relationship as we do if we would have had children immediately after getting married at 20.
What I do have a beef with is the scare tactics and rants coming up from the know-it-alls on the Brats Rant page, et al who think their point of view is the only one. Yeah it's freaking stupid for people to bring their child to Dave and Buster's at 12:30 am, or bring a toddler to see a 9:00pm PG-rated movie. Sensible people know that. But what you do is take all of the caring, nurturing parents who rear their children appropriately and lump them all is as "st00pid breeders."
I just wanted to take this opportunity to tell warn you about this mindset, and publicly ask the ranters to STFU. The reason you can't handle children is likely that you haven't stopped being children yourselves. I'm not trying to excuse the bad behavior of bad parents... most of the miserable people who should not have had children... but I do want to stop hearing about my choices are hurting your enjoyment of the planet. Your enjoyment of the planet ain't gonna last, but respectable children brought up to be respectable adults are the only hope we have to improve society over time.
Unless you've prefer us to all be "decanted" from our "bottles," raised to wait in line for our SOMA rations. *smirk*
Getting my wife pregnant is the WORST mistake I ever made.
:)
I don't suppose you ever took the effort to consider your point of view, and both your wishes, before getting married? Or are you one of those idiots who "gave in" so your wife would quit whining about kids?
You didn't make a mistake, you're just an idiot.
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).
Sounds like your first one, congratuations.
Okay Rookey, some words of advice. Check with your mom, and or dad on the following:
The first child can come at any time, all the others take nine months.
Heavly consider a Epideral for child bearing, its liquid La Mosss. Other wise, your wife will never let you forget what she went through.
If your wife comments on her looking fat. LEAVE THE AREA IMMEDIATLY!!! Life is to short for what's going to happen next.
Raising children is not a spectator sport. Its hands on 7/24. You're are already Biometrically equiped. A cheap audio feed back device is more than enough for the job you have to do.
There is no 1-800 number for user manuals, complaints, or refunds.
If your child cries, check diapers, bottle, formula. Repeat for the next 18 years.
Beating your child is a waste of time, and could give you meta-carpel. A little swat on the bottom seems to be a decent attention getter. A 60 second timeout in total continual silence helps the child to stop and think, and you to calm down too. Just about every criminal was beaten/abused as a child.
Bring pictures to the work place, these will be worth more than gold.
When you talk to others who have not brought a child into the world; They will have no idea what you're talking about, or why.
The first 2 weeks of raising a newborn child will be hell for you. Then, after that; It won't get much better.
Once again, congrats.
>>While taking care of the child once it arrives may be selfless, the reasons for choosing to have them in the first place are almost always centered around the parent rather than the child.
That seems to be an impossible challenge. You're asking for a general imperative that is specific to the individual, but isn't itself subjective?
So you're ruling out arguments like "I want to pass on my genes" (a poor argument, but just an example) as well as "well, that's why we have _reproductive_ organs" as well as "Given all the poverty and unhappiness in the world, I would like to give a child the chance that I had".
OK, how about this one? As a species, we have a biological imperative to breed. That's a universal truth, common to all life. However, that urge is instantiated in the individual. It is a selfish act, because humans are driven by individual impulses, not the collective will of the majority (unless we subsume it, as in a democracy).
We have to make the choice, because we're individuals, driven by a genetic imperative. Why is sex pleasurable? We didn't invent it. It's there to encourage us to breed. We've just begun to learn how to fool it, that's all.
I have found audio monitors work well. I have a philips 900Mhz that works well although it does pick up occasional static. I tried a 2.4Ghz but in my area of silicon valley I get worse range with it. These things are very dependant on construction. Audio only is fine and I don't worry about breathing but just crying. If you are worried that the baby is not breathing then video will not make you feel better. I tried a 2-way radio (walkie talkie), but getting the right signal to noise was tough and it just ended up broadcasting static. Do recall that almost any system will end up bugging your house. Not that your baby crying is something anyone wants to see. I took the wireless monitor and baby on vacation recently and oh, how great! We could put our 6 month old to sleep for the evening and go to the hotel restaurant. That was great and relaxing. -Whatever you decide, set it up now. In the first few months the sleep deprivation makes troubleshhoting very hard. So set up the monitoring system, the web site photo gallery and any other technical or software projects before the baby comes. -Best of luck and have fun.
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