The Story

I had an old camera from long ago. It was a Howard Enterprises NCK9127C. For a while, it was hooked up to my Ultra2 via a vintage Sun VideoPix, an Sbus framecapture board. The VideoPix actually lost official OS support after SunOS-4.1 but some people managed to port its drivers to SunOS-5.x. This worked all the way until SunOS-5.6 (Solaris-2.6). When Solaris-7 came out with its 64-bit kernel, the VideoPix kernel modules no longer loaded so the camera became useless.

Recently, I acquired an Sbus SunVideo board (not SunVideoPlus... seems I'm always running discontinued framegrabbers) off of eBay (for USD$53 including S&H) which is still supported under the latest releases of Solaris. After plugging the camera in, I discovered that the power supply was shot. The camera pulls 180mA at 12VDC and the power supply that came with it outputs a maximum of 200mA at 12VDC. Digging into my crate of random electronic parts, I managed to find a substitute power supply that provided 12VDC output but at 500mA. Taking a bet that this would not overload the camera, I plugged it in. It worked... for a little while. Later that evening, the camera stopped working and sent really odd images to the SunVideo. I must have blown something out in the camera.

So... I started shopping for a new camera. I looked at several video conferencing cameras like the one I had including the more advanced Howard Enterprises models. However, I soon discovered that for the price, I could do better performancewise with a CCTV camera. The SunVideo has three inputs. Two are composite analog (RCA barrel connectors) and one is S-Video. I could plug in just about any high-quality camera. I decided that something with good low-light capability would be great. The NCK9127C could handle down to a minimum of 10 lux illumination which is good for a typical vid-conf camera but pales in comparison to the average CCTV surveillance camera at the same pricepoint. Those things can usually work well into the sub-1 lux range. Some of them even have IR capability which will allow you to shoot in 0.1 lux conditions and some even have IR illuminators built into the unit so you can go into total darkness.

I decided on a camera made with a Sony CCD since I read from several sources that Sony made the best quality CCDs. I picked up a Sony colour model CC4440 with IR capability "bullet" (because it's shaped like a bullet) surveillance camera meant for outdoor installations (weatherproof housing) for about USD$200.

The second camera you see here is an Aiptek Pencam2. It's actually a low-quality digital still camera. I originally bought it to carry with me while cycling since I didn't want anything heavy, bulky or expensive. Its image quality is less than spectacular but makes a nice supplemental camera. It's currently supported under Windows only so I have it hooked up to my Win2K machine and am driving it using Bill Oatman's SpyCam package which exports the image over NFS from the Windows box to my Sun workstation.

The Setup

The Sony camera is hooked up to port1 (composite video-in) of the SunVideo board. It has a single cable leading from the housing which splits into two connectors. The first is a video output with a BNC(f) style connector and the second is a barrel connector meant for power which is supplied by a small AC-DC converter/adapter that came with the unit. The camera came with a BNC(f)-RCA(m) converter and a 25' long cable with BNC(m) on both ends which is meant for longer distance installations. Instead of having a huge spool of cable laying about my desk, I went to Radio Shack and bought a BNC(m)-RCA(f) converter and used a relatively short run cable (that I had been using for the old camera) with RCA(m) connectors on either end. The SunVideo inputs are all female. I also gutted the old NCK9127C housing and turned it into a camera pod to house my Sun MicrophoneII and provide a swivel base for the new camera which I mounted on top. The mount that came with the Sony camera was meant for installation into a wall and is basically an alimunum post with a ball-swival joint that screws into one of two mounting taps. The base of the pod is normally velcro-attached to the top of one of my Sun 20" monitors.

Solaris already has driver support for this framecapture board. I use an application simply called Webcam written by Philippe Oechslin to grab the images from the SunVideo and output them as a JPEG file. I wrote a cheesy shell-wrapper which I simply call webcam.sh to do this every 15 seconds. I also included some sound effects by simply sending .au files to /dev/audio to give me some warning a few seconds before and when an image is exported. Currently, I just start the shell-wrapper everytime I want to have the camera on and ctrl-C it to kill the loop when I want to turn it off. Maybe one of these days in my copious spare time, I will write a nice something-Tk interface to do the same thing.

The index page (which you are looking at) includes some JavaScript to launch a remote window. It also includes a link to the Java applet to view the image. You can simply view the source if you're really interested.

Impressions

The construction of the camera is top-notch with an all-aluminum housing. I'm impressed with the packaging. There's a little light-sensor on the bottom of the camera (or top depending on which orientation you choose to mount it) to tell it when to switch on its IR illuminators (10 LEDs). The camera has IR sensitivity built into the CCD so it always sees into that spectral range. The odd thing is that although the LEDs illuminate in the IR range, you can see a faint red glow from them. I'm not sure if this was intentional or just a byproduct of their construction. Also, during low-light conditions, the images tend to show blacks and greys with a greenish hue. I think this is due to the CCD's IR sensitivity. All other colours seem correct. You can continue to get colour images until things go near total darkness. When there's extremely low light (less than 0.2 lux), the camera switches to IR black and white mode so all colour is lost. One thing I've noticed however is that the IR illuminators are too powerful for the ranges I'm using the camera. This causes a lot of overexposure on short range images and likewise I get "reflections" off the glass and even the mesh screen of my window when I point the camera out to the street. For the most part however, throughout its illumination range, the images are extremely crisp and clear. The only thing I really would like to have is an override switch for the IR illuminators instead of just relying on the photovoltaic cell to determine when they should come on.

The SunVideo board seems to work pretty well. And the framecapture application seems okay with one exception. Using ShowMeTV or VIC or other framecapture applications, I have no problems with the SunVideo, however Webcam gives me a "unix: NOTICE: zs3:ring buffer overflow" message if I'm moving the mouse about a lot when an image is being captured. Also my mouse pointer jumps around to random locations when this happens. I'm not sure exactly how to fix this.