DIY Home Security - ON A BUDGET!

home security setups using cameras are becoming much more commonplace these days and rightly so because they are a really good way of securing your home however when you start to add more than one camera it can really add up in cost especially as some companies charge a monthly fee to get full functionality but did you know that it's possible to make a multi-camera setup for hardly any money at all well you can and that's what we are going to be doing in this video so what we're going to be doing is using old laptop webcams now these are extremely tiny as you can see so they're really easy to make discreet so they aren't noticeable and they're also very cheap to buy you can buy them either separately or you could retrieve them from old dead or smashed up laptops like this one so I'm just going to be going through the different ways you can acquire these first and then I'll be showing you how to wire them up to get full functionality but first a message from this video sponsor Nord VPN now a VPN is a Virtual Private Network and essentially gives you an encrypted pathway to the internet adding another level of security to keep your online activity safe from being intercepted by hackers which is particularly important for public Wi-Fi as it routes your connection through one of their superfast secure servers of which there are thousands in many different countries you can bypass IPs blocks by appearing to be in a completely different geographical location which is also a great way of viewing content that is region limited to get a whopping 66% of a two-year plan visit Nord VPN comm /di perks or click the link in the description and use the offer code DIY perks to sign up and get your internet secure today so again that's Nord VPN comm slash DIY perks with the offer code DIY perks so as I mentioned earlier one of the ways you can acquire these webcams is to remove them from old dead laptops this is fairly simple to do as it usually only requires the screen bezel to be removed by undoing several screws around it exposing the webcam itself this can be carefully lifted out and the cable it's plugged into is something we'll need to sew to remove it without disassembling the laptop further we can just cut it off with enough wiring left to solder to later so removing these from dead laptops is a great way to get them for free as often they would just be thrown away but another super way to get your hands on them is to simply buy them online you see plenty of laptop recycling centers strip laptops down to their bare components and then sell them as spare parts on eBay there are literally thousands of listings for laptop webcams and it's possible to get them for as little as 150 posted which is excellent value though make sure that you buy them with the connecting cable wire as it will make connecting them much easier so once you have a few of them it's time to wire them up which is thankfully quite easy as they use the USB protocol so can be wired up to any old USB cable depending on where you want to mount the final cameras you may need to solder them to some fairly long ones with five meters being the maximum length coming straight from the webcam you can extend things further though using a cheap USB repeater which should allow you to get runs of up to 30 meters once you have your cables chopping off the end and exposing the wires inside reveals four of them two of which are for power with the other two being for data and they're almost always color-coordinated the webcams themselves however don't follow any particular color scheme so we'll have to work out what each wire is manually using a multimeter on beeper mode the easiest one to work out is the ground connection as there are almost always screw holes that are ringed with copper that go to ground with the multimeter touching one of these holes we can test each of the wires to find out which is connected to nope nope that's the one so this is the ground this is very consistent between webcam boards so you shouldn't have any problems finding it now there's another common characteristic with the wiring that makes finding the data connections easy can you see it that's right they each have a twisted pair of wires which are always the data connection as that's how USB cables reduce interference among other things on the data lines there's no way of knowing which of the data connections is positive and which is negative so you'll need to take a guess if a USB device not recognized error gets thrown up just swap them around and it should correct itself so the last wire to find is the positive connection and a relatively reliable way of discovering which one it is is to look for a small transistor light component on the board which is actually a power regulator it might be anywhere and there may be more than one in any case test each of its contacts to find which one connects directly to one of the outbound wires as this will be the positive connection one of the contacts will also connect directly to ground so don't get confused and test it more than once so if all goes well you can plug them straight into a computer which will then install the webcam drivers and then they can be used as a standard digital video input nice as the webcams are so small is possible to mount them almost anywhere with the help of some sugru which is a putty that sets as hard as rubber just make sure you don't cover the lens itself with the stuff I put some blue tuck over mine and then pulled it off once I'd finished molding the sugru to keep it clean this is a great way of securing them to a wall or a corner against the ceiling and once set is really discreet and you're very unlikely to notice them another benefit of this is that they are really hard to vandalize as you can't get your hands around them to pull them off or hit them if they're in the corner once you have a few around your home you can loop the wires to a central location using USB repeaters if required after which is time to work on the central control hub for this we'll need an old but otherwise functioning laptop it really doesn't need to be anything special even this 12 year old Dell is plenty powerful enough for the job and you can even get away with something like this 20 year old Toshiba if you only went with a couple of camera feeds either way setting it up is really easy what we need to do is plug the cameras into the USB ports and install contr camp which is a free piece of video surveillance software this allows you to add your cameras after which you can record the feed setup timers or motion-activated email alerts online backups and access among other things unfortunately adding a third USB based camera is unlikely to work due to driver and bandwidth limitations but there is thankfully an easy way around this by adding another route USB controller you see old laptops like this usually have expansion card slots allowing you to plug in a variety of adding cards this one adds two more USB ports but not like a standard USB hub that runs off the PC Xone route but instead adds another root hub controller doubling the available bandwidth with one of these installed it allows another two cameras to be added which is a very respectable setup for most situations using an old Fujitsu I even managed to get six cameras going at once as it not only had an expansion card slot like the Dell but it also had to route USB controls inside one of which was dedicated to the original webcam so was easy to access by soldiering a USB port to the old webcam cable it can now be deployed in your chosen location I put mine in a cupboard above a door and once the lid was closed you just wouldn't know it was there as it has a built-in battery as well it's even got a few hours of power Londyn see which is excellent if the power ever gets cut and is a feature available only on really expensive security systems as you can see the feed to is surprisingly sharp and can provide excellent coverage of a home not bad at all considering that this setup cost a fraction of something bought and allows for a lot of flexibility as to how you set it up to meet your own personal requirements so I hope you've enjoyed this video and I hope you have fun making your own home security setup on a budget don't forget to check out noir VPN as well if you want to secure your internet but other than that I'm Matt you've been watching DIY perks and I really hope I see you next time goodbye for now

Channel: DIY Perks

Views: 3,960,468

Rating: 4.933404 out of 5

Keywords: diy, home security, cctv, video surveillance, laptop webcams, webcam

Id: CouxmNqxO4A

Length: 9min 11sec (551 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 26 2018