Basically I want to use the cameras not for surveillance but for motion detection. Instead of having a motion sensor inside the house I want to be notified as soon as someone appears in front of the windows that the cameras monitor.
For this I need to turn the cameras ON when I leave the house and back OFF when I return.
I managed to to this in DiskStation's surveillance manager (see above post) using a shell script that I can call from my iPad. I put bookmarks to the scripts on my home screen.
One problem remains: the cameras themselves are still on and even more annoying: when I'm watching TV, the IR filter sometimes clicks on and off which makes a very audible noise.
I found this really impressive insight into the scheduling feature, however this does not seem to be available on my 8608 models, only the 9810 can be turned off as described in this forum post.
I tried everything I could think off to turn the two other cameras off remotely (a remotely controlled outlet would have been my last option, but I did not want to buy more stuff). I found this excellent blog entry and from here my way to the Foscam H.264 cameras CGI API documentation which is actually pretty good and lets you do many things with the camera - but not turning it on and off.
Finally my solution: I still can't turn the camera off, but I can turn it all the way up and against the wall - which for me solves my problems. The clicking stops because the camera is not facing my TV screen any more and the wife does not feel like she's being constantly monitored. :-)
When I turn the cameras on, they swivel back into their guarding positions which looks kind of cool actually, so I like it. :-)
To accomplish this, I used the regular web frontend to program two preset positions into each camera, one facing the wall and one facing the windows.
Then you can get them to go to their presets using this call:
wget -O- --http-user=admin --http-password=PASSWORD "http://CAM-IP/cgi-bin/hi3510/preset.cgi?-act=goto\&-number=1"number is the preset position to use, they start at 0 so it's easy to try which number you need to set.
Yipikaye! That should prevent unpleasant surprises. I will assess physical security in Feb, just before the two of us are going to Moscow (virtually). Looking forward (though you might not have known.. yet)
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