Cleverdog: Low Cost CCTV Replacement Solution (Part 1)

A client of my wife commissioned us to install Cleverdog wireless IP cameras around their manufacturing plant.  They decided to go wireless for many reasons.  The existing wired security camera setup was too expensive to maintain.  Since they are located north of Manila, repair costs P1,500 per visit whether there is only one camera to fix, or more.  Second, rats were chewing on the wires.  Unfortunately, the camera wires the rats chewed off were the ones in the plant's fringe, so the supplier was charging them upwards of P60,000 for rewires.  Another reason was the cameras used were getting obsolete (PAL video system), so replacements were hard to come by.  They were also lagging behind the real time monitoring features of current generation IP cameras, since their current system requires a large bandwidth that cannot be supported by their wireless internet connection (Globe Tatoo).

Although most of the legacy system's cameras were still working, the client wanted to augment it with Cleverdog IP cameras, so he can monitor his plant at any time of the day, since the plant has a night shift.

The nice thing about Cleverdog cameras is that they are very easy to setup.  As long as there is a decent internet connection, installation is a breeze with the app available on iOS, and Android.  Once set up, streaming video from Cleverdog does not require a large bandwidth, so it is perfect for our client's slow internet connection.  Others may argue that the video quality may not be HD, but for our client's use, video quality was enough, meaning he was able to recognize the persons on the video (one of the things he was after was to catch people smoking in the plant premises).  A couple of features also made Cleverdog attractive to our client besides the basic feature of recording.  The camera has a night mode, which illuminates the scene with infrared light, and this automatically kicks in whenever the camera detects low light.  It also has a motion detect feature that notifies the owner whenever movement is detected.  The only downside is that it only accepts up to 32GB microSD, so continuous video recording is only up to seven days.  The client did not mind, since for their use, when interesting incidents happen, they are reported within the hour, so having seven days of stored video is already too much.

It was apparent that what he was after was the real time monitoring of his business anywhere, anytime.

The client ordered a trial run of six Cleverdog units to be placed in strategic locations around the plant:
1.  1 camera for the security guard (the guard on duty often sleeps on duty)
2.  1 camera at the driveway (for him to see how many delivery trucks are present)
3.  2 cameras at the production area where there is a high risk of people smoking or slacking off
4.  2 cameras at another production area to monitor people on the evening shift

The challenge was that the plant sits on a one hectare lot, and the areas he wanted to cover were spread out into 4 separate locations that an off the shelf wifi router would not be able to cover entirely.  The security guard, and driveway cameras can connect to the router at the office, but the other two locations are too far from the office.  Location #3 was 95 meters from the office, while location #4 is 110 meters away.  The problem would have been simpler if there was a clear line of sight from the office to these areas, so the wifi signal would have no obstacles in reaching the cameras, but there were structures built in between that degrades communications between the router, and the cameras.

(continued on part 2)