Bee camera setup

Tom Goddard
April 29, 2018

Here are the technical details of the live bee camera video provided by web site beesplease.net.

Two Hikvision DS-2CD2032-I security cameras.
Replaced 4mm lenses with 6mm lenses so cameras can be far enough from hive entrance to not interfere with bee flight, and still get a close-up view.
Run 24 hours, 7 days a week.
3 Mpixel (2048 x 1536 pixels), color, fixed focus, with infrared for night recording.
Use 1280 x 720 video to reduce network bandwidth, with variable bit rate limited to 8 Kbits/sec.
Cost $100 per camera.

Cameras are 50 feet from house in backyard in San Francisco.
Cameras connects to a TP-LINK TL-SG-1008P power-over-ethernet switch.
Each camera connects by its own 90 foot cat5e ethernet cable for transmitting video and power.
Cables run along the fence line, under a deck, into the basement then into the house.
The switch provides 12V power over the ethernet cable.
Most consumer routers do not provide power, necessitating this switch.
Switch connects to home router.
Video stream is read by an small Intel NUC (model 5i5RYK) computer (4.5 x 4.25 x 1 inch) connected by ethernet cable to the router.

Web server:

Intel NUC runs Ubuntu 16.04 LTS operating system.
Apache 2 web server hosts beesplease.net site.
ffmpeg converts camera RTSP feed from cameras to segmented HLS video.
Browser clients use hls.js for playback or native HLS support (on iOS).
To save energy (switch, router, computer) video is streamed from camera and converted to HLS only when web page is visited. This uses a python CGI script hls_on_demand.py I wrote to dynamically start ffmpeg when the page is loaded.
Web site is served from home ISP service, sonic.net gigabit fiber.
Plan to use Sonic's dynamic DNS REST API to keep beesplease.net pointing at dynamically assigned IP address.
Dynamic IP assignment changes less than once per week.