Tag Archives: technicalDevelopment

Cheap IP cameras: the Edimax IC-3010WG

A much cheaper solution for IP video than the Axis Q7401, the Edimax IC-3010WG network camera is only ยฃ80 from use-IP.co.uk. For your money, you get a white plastic camera with a choice of wired or wifi network connections with … Continue reading

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First look at the Axis video encoder.

Yesterday was our first opportunity to take the brand new Axis Q7401 video encoder for a test drive. It’s a well engineered and rugged unit which takes composite video and turns it into an M-JPEG or h.264 MPEG-4 stream. The … Continue reading

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Trunking calls between Asterisk servers with IAX2.

At the end of last week we managed to create an IAX to IAX trunk between 2 asterisk servers on the local wired LAN. IAX trunking is a way to connect multiple Asterisk servers and allow clients of different servers … Continue reading

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Set up Asterisk conference calling with MeetMe.

I made my first (2-way) conference call on Asterisk/Meetme just now. To enable MeetMe with Asterisk, you first need to edit your meetme.conf in /etc/asterisk/ , mine looks like this:

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Axis of Openness

Frustrated with the poor image quality and/or interfaces of our existing IP cameras, it’s time to search for better alternatives. New trends in IP camera technology include megapixel sensors, h.264 video encoding and, reportedly, open standards. There are several interesting … Continue reading

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Testing IP cameras, part 2

Now we’ve seen that the nice and simple DCS-900 is pretty handy when controlled from Linux with no ActiveX. Time to examine the much more complex DCS-3220g, which should give us MPEG-4 encoded video. It’s another rebadged Vivotek as far … Continue reading

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Testing IP cameras – pt.1

Since ERA already has some IP cameras from previous years, it’s probably time to dust them off and try them out with the new Asus 901s. We have a pair of D-Link badged items – a DCS-900 wired-only Motion-JPEG camera … Continue reading

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Using smartphones as …phones.

Could it be that the way to make a telephone call on a geology site would be to use a telephone? Now we seem to have some fairly stable WiFi networking hardware, and are considering that we might ditch the … Continue reading

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Investigating video upgrades

During our field trials, it became clear that the built-in video camera on the Asus EEE 901 (and 701) is in the wrong place for our needs. The 901 camera itself is a pretty good (for a plastic lens webcam) … Continue reading

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