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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."
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
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.
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.
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...
Have you thought about trying good old fashioned parenting? Perhaps "being there" is the best way to monitor your child...
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. 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. I'm sure your employer won't mind you taking 18years of maternity/paternity leave. 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). Grandparents, brothers, sisters, close friends, ALL not good enough to watch YOUR little one. Hell, leaving your kid with a grandparent is almost as bad as leaving your kid in a car in the Arizona desert with the windows rolled up and a quad processor Opteron running inside with a RAID array with 15k/rpm scsi drives.
You my friend are brilliant and your insights make it obvious that you are wise beyond your years. I was wondering what kind of car to get to replace my old beater that broke down for the last time. Having been enlightened by your wisdom, I shall now walk the 12 miles to my office. I shall also stop wasting money purchasing my food and simply hunt the small animals in my neighborhood for nourishment. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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
You know what, I'm sick of this crap everytime somebody brings up this subject. Take a look at the whole question. He's talking about monitoring while a babysitter is there, not about ignoring the child while both parents are home. As a parent, I can attest to the fact that you need to get away every once in a while so that you aren't tempted to hand your child over to scientific research or something like that. The problem is that there are very few trustworthy babysitters, and those that we have been able to find are always in high demand. Personally, I share others' sentiments that it is much better to get someone you can trust than it is to monitor, but I also understand the frustration and anxiety of leaving your child with someone else.
"Old fashioned" parents also had to leave their children with babysitters, but you can bet that if the technology to monitor the baby (and babysitter) had been available, they'd have considered using it too.
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
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.
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?
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 know what, I'm sick of this crap everytime somebody brings up this subject. Take a look at the whole question. He's talking about monitoring while a babysitter is there, not about ignoring the child while both parents are home."
The clue is in your own words.
He has a babysitter babysitting.
He does NOT need to be watching the baby while the babysitter is there - that's WHY he has a babysitter.
What an excellent way to show the babysitter just how much they are appreciated - "Watch my baby, but I'll be watching you...".
Besides, if he and his wife are out for the evening to get a break, then watching the babty over the cellphone is not exactly having a break, is it?
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
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.
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
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.
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.