Repurpose Your Old Android Device As a Security Camera!

[FoxKat]

Yep. Hear it all the time. My cat which died late last summer knew my wife was pregnant before she had any visible signs. She was standing in the back yard and he (who was a stray kitten), just came right up to her and started rubbing in slalom fashion back and forth between her legs. From when we took him in, he would sleep on her belly.

Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk

 

[Mustang02]

Night vision is grainy but viewable.

 

[Jonny Kansas]

Yeah. Flash works better.

Fyi-If you haven't tried it, the web view let's you zoom in a few times. Also rather grainy, but kinda cool.

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

 

[Mustang02]

Flash I can see his collar. Not much better.

 

[xtor]

My monitor is my note 4 and camera is a old droid maxx.....this works great!

DV65

 

[FoxKat]

Night vision is grainy but viewable.

Well the reason it's grainy is because of possibly one of three different things, or even more likely a combination of the three.

First, the camera sensors have clusters of sensitive areas and each cluster of three individual sensitive areas detect either Red, Blue or Green (or more likely Magenta, Cyan & yellow), making up nearly the full spectrum of visible light and colors from white to black. Since only the red sensor is sensitive to the red end of the spectrum (i.e. including near infrared) the other two colors, blue and green see essentially no light in near total darkness.

As a result that effectively reduces the resolution of the other color representation by a factor of three (i.e. a 9 MP camera looks more like a 3MP camera), and therefore you naturally have a more grainy image. This is the exact opposite of how displays work, in that the individual pixels actually are comprised of three tiny red, blue and green lights (LEDs), clustered together to make up the colors ranging from black to white and a very good cross section of the colors in-between. So in the sensor it would be like turning off two out of every three LEDs on your display monitor (the blue and green ones) and leaving those areas black and having the picture only showing with the red LEDs.

Second, with low light photography you have a phenomenon where the sensor seeing nearly no light will instead create "noise" (specks of random black and light pixels), across the entire screen. Stray electrons moving about near the sensors (or bleedover), among other issues cause this. This shows up in the picture as what looks like moving (in video), or static (in pics), dirt specs, and a resulting graininess. From Wikipedia (How to Avoid Noise in Your Digital Photography

"In a digital camera, noise manifests itself as speckles, usually colored and without pattern. These are generally caused by unwanted electron flow in and around the sensor adding to the desired electron flow. Noise can be caused by imperfections in the sensor itself such as "hot pixels"[4], randomness in the distribution of the limited numbers of photons available at low light levels,[5] and the sensor or camera overheating[6]."

Third, through software the app will turn up the sensitivity of the red sensors and turn down or off the blue and green ones further solidifying the visually apparent factor of three reduction in resolution.

Professional infrared cameras use sensors that have only red and IR sensitive areas so there isn't empty dots in every direction in two out of every three areas of the sensor clusters


Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk

 

[FoxKat]

There are ads??? I haven't seen any.

Here's an example of the "ads". Very non-invasive...

 

[Jonny Kansas]

Is this the app that I had pop an ad up as I excited a camera, or was that a game I was playing...? Haha

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

 

[smalltowngirl13]

I set up 3 phones today - 2 android and a 4S iPhone...the 4S does not have motion detection but support indicates that they are working on it. I am using my iPhone 6S Plus as a viewer as well as the S7 Edge...everything is working flawlessly to this point.


~sent while mobile~

 

[Mustang02]

Looks like we're all getting in on this.

 

[Efin]

This weekend will be a setup fest, gotta figure out that GNex though. Glad to hear the iPhone works too, have a couple of those too...

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk

 

[popcenator]

What Android version are you running on the GNex? I think I'm on 4.1 and it's working well.

Sent from my Nexus 6P

 

[bkdodger]

I see y'all having fun in here ...I have nothing to tape


6s Plus

 

[Efin]

What Android version are you running on the GNex? I think I'm on 4.1 and it's working well.

Sent from my Nexus 6P

Something like that, I recall it's an AOKP build from the days of flashing roms daily...

Sent from an iGalaxy Tab S2

 

[popcenator]

That GNex, always was a pain.

Sent from my Nexus 6P