Home surveillance

posted on 06:53 AM on Saturday 21 October 2017

Always wanted to set up a home surveillance system. Especially now that we have Donut, it would be nice to check up on her. We already have a DLINK DCS-5222LB1 which works really nicely. It has a pretty wide view which is useful and the image is not too bad. And it is rather cheap. Pauline got a cheap IP camera from a friend but that did not work out so well. For the recording, I got a cheap Synology DS216j fitted with a 3TB drive. I was debating for a longest time on a better model but they do cause a lot more. In the end, I got a cheap low powered one since I was not sure how well it would work. And boy was I surprised to see how well this little cheap thing worked. It was mostly plastic and adding the hard drive was like putting one into one of those portable hard drive cases. But it worked and the software was polished. The software was the thing that sold me. Simple to set up and worked right out of the box with the DLINK. The cheap IP camera did not work but I did not really expect it to. Got another DLINK DCS-5222LB1 to replace it. The surveillance station software was very powerful and simple. A few poking around and I soon had the thing doing motion recording. The timeline viewer was great in showing when events happen and you can view it straight from the browser. So all in all, it worked wonderfully well for such a cheap thing. The software is the one that really nails it showing that a well put together product is much more than the sum of its parts.