Planning the network

Our chickens enjoy a large 20ft x 30ft (6m x 8m) run half way down our garden, along with a shed at the end of the garden where we keep the chicks. The plan is to put a couple of cameras in the chicken run and a couple to watch over the chicks.

We have an ADSL modem in our house which provides our Internet connection and the plan is to extend our home network wirelessly to the shed at the end of the garden (around 250ft/76m) and to use a mixture of wireless and wired connections to connect the cameras up to this network.

The diagram below shows a rough plan of how it will all fit together:

The plan is to put together the network using mainly discarded equipment and cameras from around the office. An initial scavanging hunt yielded:

2 x Tenvis JPT3815 pan/tilt IP cameras – These cheap and cheerful IP cameras are readily available from ebay for about £35. They have 15 IR LEDs to allow them to see at night and offer reasonable picture quality. The web based firmware allows you to grab jpeg still images, HTTP motion jpeg streams and most usefully a vlc video stream.

1 x Tenvis IP602 external camera – Fixed camera ruggedized for outside use. Otherwise similar to above.

2 x Orite IP camera – Very old and not particularly capable, but couldn’t resist making some use of them.

Linksys DG-834 router – A very useful find as its an early version which we can install the OpenWRT firmware onto. We will cover this in a later post.

2 x Linksys WAP56G wireless access points – These provide wireless bridging which we will take advantage of to extend our home network down to the shed at the end of the garden.

The main challenge I forsee is getting a reliable connection and decent level of bandwidth from the Wifi extension between the house and the chick shed as at 76M this may require non standard aerials.