Fixed surface velocity cameras – Brands/Models?

[Daniel Wennerberg]

Hi all,

We at SMHI are going to trial fixed surface velocity cameras at two stations. One where we suspect quite a lot of hysteresis and one where we have problems with a constantly shifting hydraulic control due to an illegal dumping of 20 tons of gravel…

We are leaning towards using Axis network cameras. They seem to have quite a long lifecycle and some attractive features such as onboard masking of personal information even in a livestream which would help us with the personal integrity aspect of setting up cameras.

We are also looking a little bit at Ubiquiti which is at a significantly lower price-point.

What are your experiences in terms of brands and models?

/Daniel

Topic

[JamesBomhof]

Hi Daniel,

I’m a bit late to post here, did you make a decision? In Canada we’ve had good success with the AXIS P1378LE camera. They’ve been reliable and have good picture quality. One key aspect to security cameras that I’ve found is that they need to record to local storage, typically an SD card. Initially we had set them up to send the video the a raspberry pi via ethernet and found that the videos were being corrupted. We now have the cameras record a video locally to the SD card, and then download them to the raspberry pi afterwards (this is just our setup, you could also skip the raspberry pi completely). I’ve done some programming using python and the AXIS API that I can share if you are interested.

Other features I like about the AXIS camera: easy to set up masking for privacy, can manually correct for barrel distortion on the camera.

cheers,

James

[Daniel Wennerberg]

Hi James!,

Sorry for this tardy response, I was on vacation and had to hit the ground running with a surge of floods hitting just as I got back.

I will use the old proverb, “great minds think alike”, as I actually landed on that exact same model and have two waiting for me back at the office!

I expect any use of a Raspberry Pi to be a bit of a hassle to get through our IT-security people as they are very strict about adding stuff into their ecosystem/infrastructure. I do love the RPi though. I will likely send you a message once we hit a brick wall inventing the wheel again!

 

 

[Nick Everard]

I’d be very interested to see how you install these – how are they powered for example.

Does anyone have a schematic and/or parts list…?

[Daniel Wennerberg]

Schematic can be found here: https://www.axis.com/dam/public/18/a0/68/axis-p1378-le-network-camera-en-US-115406.pdf

Its quite a robust aluminium housing. Single PoE cable goes through the mounting arm if you want to, so you could put it up without exposing any cables.

We could arrange a video call if you wanted to have a visual demonstration.

We also saw the same model of camera being used for on-board processing of surface velocity at the regatta this fall outside of Lyon. The company was called Tenevi if memory serves me right. So, instead of sending a lot of videos, you get the discharge directly…

/Daniel

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