Boat wide Wi-Fi with surveillance cameras, Internet and Garmin gpsmap 7000 series ch

[Rock-Head]

Originally Posted by Jerry Woodward

Lamb Chop
I'm curious if you can access your webcam from outside your LAN, i.e. from a phone or computer logged into a network away from the boat. My understanding of IP cams is that you need to have access to your router to set port forwarding and a static IP address so you can access it from outside the network. If you are on a marina wifi, your IP address is the Marina IP address and I don't see how you get past that to view your cam. Do the Arlo cams work differently?

DynDNS (or similar service) would be a solution here.

[kiltym]

Originally Posted by Jerry Woodward

Lamb Chop
I'm curious if you can access your webcam from outside your LAN, i.e. from a phone or computer logged into a network away from the boat. My understanding of IP cams is that you need to have access to your router to set port forwarding and a static IP address so you can access it from outside the network. If you are on a marina wifi, your IP address is the Marina IP address and I don't see how you get past that to view your cam. Do the Arlo cams work differently?

We wrote up a blog post about this issue that may be of interest to cruisers wanting to add cameras to their boat.

I am a commercial member, and not trying to "push" our product, just trying to share some information on our website. Moderators can remove if they feel necessary.

IP (internet) Cameras on Boats – The Wirie

[Jerry Woodward]

Thanks Kiltym

Your blog confirmed what I thought: that there is new generation of cams that stream to the cloud and provide access on a phone app if you sign up for their service. Most of these have a free level of service and the cams are not much more than a typical IP camera so that looks pretty good. I found another one not listed on your blog that integrates some security features in addition to the streaming of video. The Canary cam has a built in siren and built in temperature, humidity and air quality (I presume this would be like a smoke detector). For $150.00 this would be great to put on the boat when I put it on the hard this summer. If it was pointed at the battery voltage display, I could also monitor the state of charge of the house bank. Of course, as Lamb Chop said, the Almond supports a bunch of different sensors for a pretty nice security system.
https://www.amazon.com/Canary-All-On...916446375&th=1

[Jerry Woodward]

Lamb Chop, how have your Almond routers been working? I noticed quite a few complaints in the Amazon reviews about the touch screen failing within the first year.

[Lamb Chops]

Interesting..... no issues so far. I'm thinking that several of them will be permanently configured so probably not a huge biggie. I also ultimately plan to wire them to 12 volts so that they're on all the time even when I'm sailing

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G930A using Cruisers Sailing Forum mobile app

[Jerry Woodward]

What about the Arlo Cams? They're powered by batteries, right? I'm wondering how long the batteries last?

[LoudMusic]

Originally Posted by Jerry Woodward

What about the Arlo Cams? They're powered by batteries, right? I'm wondering how long the batteries last?

I would definitely use wired IP cameras and preferably PoE, but send power over the network either way. There are adapters to inject and outject the power.

Personally I hope to use a PoE network switch and PoE cameras to minimize failure options.

[DeepFrz]

So, do you set up a web site for this? I have seen articles talking about "ThingSpeak" and "Twilio", neither of which I truly understand except that they are used to put sensor data on the cloud and communicate with your sensors. I think. Would a web site on your boat be simpler?

[Jerry Woodward]

Originally Posted by LoudMusic

I would definitely use wired IP cameras and preferably PoE, but send power over the network either way. There are adapters to inject and outject the power.

Personally I hope to use a PoE network switch and PoE cameras to minimize failure options.

Yes, PoE would be ideal but I don't believe any of the new generation cams like the Arlo or Canary can use PoE. The "conventional" IP cams that use PoE can not be accessed from the outside if they are behind a public wifi router like in a marina because you can't get past the public wifi firewall. Cams like the Arlo or Canary are set up to stream video and data to the company's cloud server. You then access the data on their server from anywhere via an app.

I believe the Arlo can be powered by USB, so that sould be almost as good as PoE.

[Lamb Chops]

Just saw these latest comments/questions.... Arlo Q is a powered camera (Usb) the wireless ones are battery powered with rechargable li-ion batrwrs tgat typically last almist a month. Both cameras upload continuosly to a cloud based server. Typically just when motion is detected. My entire system runs on 12 volts. So both the almond and the Arlo cameras are operational without Shore power

[sameCafe]

Very interested in this thread to know if you have confirmed that you can access internet and at the same time, access Garmin GPSMAP on Garmin Helm.
This will make life so much easier for using the tablet to access weather and other info at the same time without having to reconnect. Thanks so much for your efforts.

[ausaviator]

I just bought a couple of these, 1 panning 1 not.

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/3G-4G-HD...wAAOSwUM5aBXJt

Insert SIM data card and away you go... Runs on 12 volts.

There is an issue in Australia though. None of the ISP's offer a publicly available IP address unless you're on a more expensive business plan with an ABN (registered business number), so you can't remote control the camera from the Internet. The panning feature is no good unless you've got the better business plan.

You can set it up to upload to an FTP server like I have and it uploads every 10 minutes. You can get it to send an email alarm too, but the problem is that you can't remote control it to start recording other than what you have set up prior. You can set it to record to an SD card, however if someone steals the camera... it's long gone.

I set this up last week. Hosting is anywhere between US$1 and $10 per month depending on who you sign up with.
I got unlimited space and hosting and a domain name for $11 for a year, then $8 a month after that.

http://webcamstorageaus.com/ytdn/showimage.php

Unless the US is different to Aus, I can't see that with the system at the start of this thread is remotely accessible. The problem is that the world is running out of IP addresses and they don't give them out for all wireless connections.

[summerlove]

has anyone tried using this on raymarine e80 to get wifi accessibility from ipad

[ausaviator]

Further to my last post, I've finished setting up the webcam above (ignore the fact that it's out of focus if you click on the link).

Because in Australia the best plan on the best provider is 40GB of data for $150 (that's probably expensive by world standards), I've set it to take a photo and upload it every 2 minutes to a server which wasn't hard or expensive at all to arrange. The photos are 145k, so it's 24 hours x 30 x 145 x 365 = 38 GB for the year.

If you have an affordable higher data plan available, even better and you could take photos even every 30 seconds or so. Pretty good security that is always available on a remote server in case someone damages or steals your camera gear. There's no need for the added expense of remote control access when it's practically live with photos every 30 seconds or more often.

[mrm]

Originally Posted by ausaviator

Further to my last post, I've finished setting up the webcam above (ignore the fact that it's out of focus if you click on the link).

[...]

There's no need for the added expense of remote control access when it's practically live with photos every 30 seconds or more often.

If you upload images to a server, then same server may forward remote control to the camera. Either via store-and-forward or by creating and using a VPN, which gives an added bonus of strong data link encryption.