Hello DBTM readers!
No, I have not abandoned you. Yes, I've been incredibly busy.
Yes, I realize this excuse makes me a naughty blogger. Bad, bad blogger! No coffee for me!
It is, however, an honest reason. My family and I have recently moved so that I could take a new job with Netcam Shop, a small company that sells netcams (a.k.a. IP cameras).
What is a netcam? Well it's like a little web cam and computer combined and you can hook it up to your home network so that it stays connected to the internet, allowing you to watch your home remotely over the Internet from a computer, tablet or smartphone.
Now I know what you're thinking: Wait, did he just throw a sales pitch in his blog?
No, I didn't. THIS is a sales pitch: Go visit our site and check out our cameras! Once this business is doing as well as I know it will, then I can spend more time working on this blog.
But, I'm not going to leave you with nothing today, no sir! I am going to tell you about my story using a netcam as a baby monitor!
You see, the cameras are relatively simple to get set up, the only challenge is that some of the instructions are badly translated from Chinese. At Netcam Shop we are developing our own instructions for each of the cameras we sell, giving our customers a better overall experience.
Anyway, you basically plug the camera into your router using a Cat5 cable. Once your camera is powered up, you can use the software that comes with it (yes we're working on our own software too!) to find the camera on your network. Open the camera and log in, then enter your wireless network setting. Let the netcam reboot and POOF! Instant camera that you can set up anywhere in your home and view across the internet. All you need is your IP address or to set up a DNS service like no-ip.com.
But for use as a baby monitor it gets even simpler. You take your smartphone, download a IP camera app that supports your netcam model, then enter your netcam's local IP address into your new app (it will be something like 192.168.1.40), along with the netcam's port number, then POOF again! Now you can view your camera locally using your smartphone.
This is a great setup because most of these cameras have IR and two-way audio, allowing you to see your kiddo in the dark and hear them from anywhere in the house, or yard, where you're phone has a WiFi signal to connect to your home network.
The best part is the price! When my little girl was on her way into our lives, my wife and I did the baby registry thing, and I just about had a heart attack when I saw that video baby monitors were going for $200 or more!
With netcams like this one though, you can get the same setup for as little as $50. Pretty good deal for penny-pinching parents (like me!).
Oh, right, my story. So these netcams have a motion detection setting that sends you an email when the camera detects motion. For my little girl's camera, I don't worry about it much, but I do turn it on when we leave the house. One night, I forgot to turn it off and woke up to over 100 emails of my little girl rolling around in bed! Adorable and hilarious, but even more so it was useful. Turns out, one of the reasons my little lady was waking up so much was that she was rolling out of bed! To curb this, we rolled a small blanket up and put it under her mattress pad at the edge of her bed, giving it a little bumper to keep her in. It worked! We instantly started getting one or two less wake ups each night, which every parent can appreciate!
As an extra, I have about 500 pictures of my daughter sleeping. Heartwarming to be sure!
Anyway, check us out if you can. The better we do, the more time I will have to share more stories and thoughts here on Daddy By The Moments!
No comments:
Post a Comment