With the arrival of our first baby we found ourselves with the need to monitor the baby, need is a strong word lets just say we wanted to make sure the baby was sleeping in the early evening whilst we were downstairs preparing dinner.
Like most people we have a number of old "smart" phones laying around the house never to be used again but perfectly functional so we decided to use one of them, P's old G1 Android phone as the baby video monitor.
The phone has a camera at the back that we used to broadcast the video feed to the internal house wifi. Then from any computer or smart phone in the house (also connected to the same wifi) we pick the video feed to monitor the baby
Because the video feed is only being broadcast to the local wifi, ie your house wifi, the neighbors should not be able to sniff in to watch your baby sleep.
Ingredients
1 - G1 Android phone running donut 1.6
1 - Ip WebCam Android App (here)
1 - Universal Mini Tripod (We got ours here)
For the Mac OSx alternative
1 - Iris (here)
Directions
Since we had no intention to use the old phone for any other function than broadcast the phone's camera as the video feed for the video baby monitor we removed all other applications from the phone to increase the phone’s responsiveness (it is an old phone after all...)
First connect the android device to the home wifi.
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| Ip WebCam Android App |
After starting the server the screen will display the video feed from the back camera. In the top left hand corner there is a button that says "How do i connect?"
After pressing on the button the app will ask you if you want to connect to the feed either with your wifi router or using a mobile internet connection. If you have connected your phone to your home wifi (and since this is an old phone with no contract is my only option) then select "I'm using Wi-fi router"
The next dialog will explain how to connect to the feed by providing a url of the form http://10.xxx.xxx.xxx:8080/
Where 10.xxx.xxx.xxx is an IP address.
Once the feed has started it can be viewed from any computer in the house connected to the same wifi your android phone is connected to.
From a computer in the house open a browser window and enter the URL we obtained after starting ip webcam and voila you should be getting the video feed from your phone right into your laptop.
Since a mobile phone is not very "stand up right" friendly you can use a cheap tripod like the one provided in the ingredients to help position the phone and get a better shot. We use rubber bands to hold the phone with the tripod.
Mac OSx alternative
We did use the above recipe for a while, but the camera on the phone is not very good in low light conditions. We found that the device we did have always in the room was a Macbook Pro so we decided to try the same approach with the Macbook Pro instead.
For this we downloaded Iris a Mac application that allows to do the exact same thing, share your Web cam's feed in the local wifi network.
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| Iris Main Menu |
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| WebCam Icon |
From the menu select "webcam"and just like with the android version the application will provide the URL needed to monitor the web cam from a browser
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| URL to access webcam feed |
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