By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

Wireless Camera Those who attended our last meeting, which was our first meeting at the new Pepin location, saw my new Motorola Home Monitoring wireless camera at work. It allowed me to view on my laptop the entrance to the building, which was a little over 120 feet away with an office and lobby area in between it and our meeting room. This was desired since, being after hours, the doors either needed to be locked or someone would have to stay at them to give late arrivals entry.

The system worked fine. I think we only had two late arrivals, and the rest of the activity was the cleaning crew working around the entrance.

The setup consisted of a wireless camera positioned on a stool near the entrance. It was provided electricity by plugging its transformer into a nearby outlet. However, it could also have been run off batteries. The base station was connected to my laptop by a short USB cable. I emphasize short USB cable since at home I had tried to use a USB extension cable to move the base station to a location further from my laptop, but I lost the camera’s image. I know there is a limit on how long USB cables can be, so perhaps this was past the distance for this particular application. Anyway, everything worked fine with the USB cable provided by Motorola. The base unit and wireless camera are pictured on the right. The base station looks a lot like a cable modem.

To set things up, you first install the monitoring software and USB driver. You then connect the base station to your computer. Finally, you activate your remote camera. The camera has an infrared motion sensor that you can set to save the current color image to a file. This feature can be adjusted so that it will then wait a specified number of seconds before a motion will again cause it to save an image. One limitation I found is that the motion sensor will not work through glass due to its being infrared. However, at any time while you are monitoring the action, you can click the mouse on a button to save the current image. Supposedly, you can also capture short color videos with sound, but I haven’t tried that. Another yet untested feature is an email notification of an event, which, of course, requires that your computer be connected to the Internet and be able to connect to your email server.

What I purchased from CompUSA was called the Motorola Easy Start Kit Home Monitoring and Control System, Model HMEZ1000, consisting of the base station and one wireless camera for $149. The system supports up to six wireless cameras, three wired cameras and eight sensors (wireless door/window, wireless temperature and wireless water).

Now to the odd thing about all this - it is not easy to purchase the starter kit or an additional wireless camera, which I think I might want. There is no longer any in the two local CompUSA stores I use, Amazon.com has only one available, and so on. Possibly this is because they have a new version out, the HMEZ2000. And the prices really vary - all well in excess of $200 when I paid only $149.

Speaking of new versions, I went to the Motorola site and downloaded a new version of the software, which is nicer and I think is really the software that ships with the newer hardware since the software is now called Motorola Homesight software.

The Motolola site for all of this is http://broadband.motorola.com/consumers/home_monitoring.asp.

For those of you who want a standalone wireless camera and are not interested in all the monitoring stuff, you can purchase just a camera that has its own server and will appear as another object on your wireless network with its own IP address and which can then be accessed via a browser. Linksys makes one for $180, and there are other brands for around $100.

Network Stumbler In setting up the above wireless home monitoring, you need to know what wireless channel your home wireless network is operating on. There are 12 channels, 1 - 12. However, I believe that for wireless-g there are actually only three that don’t overlap: 1, 6 and 11. You can get that information from the configuration setup for your wireless router, or you can download the shareware program, Network Stumbler, that will tell you about all the wireless networks available. Once you know the channel your wireless network is using (6 is the default for most home routers), then you can put this into the configuration of the Motorola Home Monitoring setup and it will choose a different channel for itself. I had to use this program to find out what channel was being used at Pepin. You may obtain the program from http://www.netstumbler.com/.

The image below is what Network Stumbler is currently showing for the wireless networks available near my home. I have selected the Encryption On filter (none are broadcasting without encryption). As you can see, there are three wireless networks available--one mine and the two others apparently from neighbors.

There is also a Pocket PC version of Net Stumbler that you can download for your mobile device.

I will have the Motorola Home Monitoring camera at the next meeting if you missed seeing it last meeting. u