Finally, got our streaming osaprey cams

TonyT · Post by **TonyT** » Fri Mar 30, 2018 9:51 pm

STREAM SHUT OFF UNTIL TUESDAY

Partner and I set up IP cams over osprey nests for a county park last June.
Got one of our cams live today at Patuxent River Park in MD.
Second cam goes live Tuesday after repairs to microphones at both nests.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_Vvx2 ... Y3Sw8IjA9w
Additional tweaking of stream quality to be done later. May or may not be working when viewing stream.

Tech details:

Router - TP-Link AC 1750
Flir DNR - 114 - 4 TB storage (streams to tv, controlled by iPad and/or wifi mouse)
Samsung 70" tv
Dell comp - i5, 8gb ram, OBS Studio (pushes the DNR RTSP streams to youtube live channel)

TP-Link CPE510-AP (ACCESS POINT ON SHORE) (POE)
TP-Link CPE510-Client-1 (Client for OspreyCam 1) on post in water at nest)
Flir N336ZD1 - OspreyCam1
TP-Link CPE510-AP2 (ACCESS POINT ON WATER) same pole as above
Above powered by solar panels and 2 12v batteries

TP-Link CPE510-Client-2 (Client for OspreyCam 2) on pole at nest
Flir N336ZD1 - OspreyCam2
power fed in underwater conduit from boathouse

morbidpete · Post by **morbidpete** » Sat Mar 31, 2018 7:56 pm

Very cool setup!

Post by **Philip** » Sat Mar 31, 2018 10:29 pm

Woa, sweet

TonyT · Post by **TonyT** » Sun Apr 01, 2018 10:50 am

Here's a Google Sat image of the park and our setup.
You can see the PVC conduit under water.
No line of sight from visitor center to lower nest, thus the need for this setup.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Tue Apr 03, 2018 11:55 am

Love Ospreys....grew up and still live on ocean shoreline. Love all bird of prey but have an exceptional fondness of Ospreys.

Hearing them "smack" down against the water when catching some food, see them pumping their wings hard gaining altitude with a good sized catch in their talons...such a cool thing to witness.

..side note..have you looked at the solar options for powering bounce/relay points and remote end points? A lot of "point to point" setups use solar units now.

Lefty · Post by **Lefty** » Tue Apr 03, 2018 3:27 pm

One of those bastards scared the **** out of me when canoe fishing with a friend. We were fishing the shoreline, when right behind us crash then he came out of the water with a bigger catch than we had all day.

TonyT · Post by **TonyT** » Wed Apr 04, 2018 7:45 am

YeOldeStonecat wrote:Love Ospreys....grew up and still live on ocean shoreline. Love all bird of prey but have an exceptional fondness of Ospreys.

Hearing them "smack" down against the water when catching some food, see them pumping their wings hard gaining altitude with a good sized catch in their talons...such a cool thing to witness.

..side note..have you looked at the solar options for powering bounce/relay points and remote end points? A lot of "point to point" setups use solar units now.

The platform at the top nest is powered by two 400w panels which charge two deep cell batteries. 12v DC is converted to 24v AC for the camera, 24v DC for the tplink APs, 12v DC for a mic, 12v DC for an IP lamp and 12v DC for a switch. Can't use stand alone solar AP units because we need night vision.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Wed Apr 04, 2018 8:16 am

TonyT wrote:The platform at the top nest is powered by two 400w panels which charge two deep cell batteries. 12v DC is converted to 24v AC for the camera, 24v DC for the tplink APs, 12v DC for a mic, 12v DC for an IP lamp and 12v DC for a switch. Can't use stand alone solar AP units because we need night vision.

Right they're usually combined with batteries to allow functionality during "not so sunny" hours. I had seen some mention about an underwater conduit for power...done at different times then?

Post by **Philip** » Wed Apr 04, 2018 9:31 am

Can't wait to see the video feed now, seems offline.

MadDoctor · Post by **MadDoctor** » Wed Apr 04, 2018 3:04 pm

Philip wrote:seems offline.

What he said.

I only have one rule: No fins, no feathers. But I would like to see the shots you are getting!!

TonyT · Post by **TonyT** » Wed Apr 04, 2018 3:52 pm

YeOldeStonecat wrote:Right they're usually combined with batteries to allow functionality during "not so sunny" hours. I had seen some mention about an underwater conduit for power...done at different times then?

See the picture above. Under water conduit sends power to lower nest platform. You can see the PVC conduit in the pic. Upper nest at top of pic has solar panels.

TonyT · Post by **TonyT** » Wed Apr 04, 2018 3:56 pm

Feed is currently down. Tuesday we shut the system down because one of the Flir cams died (one of the park guys put in new batteries and hooked 'em up reversed, then later hooked 'em up in a series instead of parallel). Should get the replacement later this week & will post when feed goes permanently live.

Post by **Philip** » Thu Apr 05, 2018 8:59 am

Sounds good, thanks for the update Tony

TonyT · Post by **TonyT** » Thu Apr 05, 2018 8:55 pm

Testing the camera streaming now:
This is the camera 1 (top of picture above)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvXa_YSP8-U

This is camera 2 )bottom of pic above)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQtu0-rhljM

Camera 1 has been stable for the last 4 hours.
Camera 2 sometimes cuts out due to settings that need adjusting.

Microphones now work too.

Mark · Post by **Mark** » Thu Apr 05, 2018 9:18 pm

TonyT wrote:Testing the camera streaming now:
This is the camera 1 (top of picture above)
...

This is camera 2 )bottom of pic above)
...

Camera 1 has been stable for the last 4 hours.
Camera 2 sometimes cuts out due to settings that need adjusting.

Microphones now work too.

subscribed , looks good

TonyT · Post by **TonyT** » Thu Apr 05, 2018 9:34 pm

I shut off camera 2, probably until Saturday when I go out on the water.

Camera 1 seems stable.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Fri Apr 06, 2018 8:34 am

Not sure how wide the Fresnel zone is on those radios ...but when going over the water, aim up a hair, ideally not direct horizontal or down. Granted you're at a very short distance there, so a typical obstacle to overcome when doing over the water shots...."thermal inversion"..shouldn't come into much play. But I notice those radios are more medium distance...distance >15km, so make sure they're dialed down as low as you can go for TX power. For shots of a hundred feet or so...medium distance radios can tend to be "too hot"....too much TX power and noise. Which can get messy to handle over water with thermal inversions (usually noticed the most during big temp changes).

TonyT · Post by **TonyT** » Fri Apr 06, 2018 8:38 am

both cams up now while testing:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_Vvx2 ... Y3Sw8IjA9w
image quality and sound are good so far.
Can't figure out why the rtsp from cam 2 (down river) drops out and encoding stops at that point. The tcp streams never cust out to the tv though, only to the comp running OBS, which encodes the rtsp to rtmp and pushes to youtube.

TonyT · Post by **TonyT** » Sat Apr 07, 2018 1:05 pm

Now using ffmpeg, an instance for each cam, to stream to youtube.
Seems stable so far.
Had a brain fart and realized why camera 2 stream is choppy.
Our TPLink access point and client are aimed correctly at each other, but we failed to take into consideration that last winter's ice moved the vertical positions of the posts these TPLinks are fastened to. Looks like another trip out on the water to straighten up the posts. Double 4x4 PT sunk about 6-8 feet in the mud.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_V...0vUeY3Sw8IjA9w

cybotron r_9 · Post by **cybotron r_9** » Sun Apr 08, 2018 11:47 am

TonyT wrote:both cams up now while testing:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_Vvx2 ... Y3Sw8IjA9w
image quality and sound are good so far.
Can't figure out why the rtsp from cam 2 (down river) drops out and encoding stops at that point. The tcp streams never cust out to the tv though, only to the comp running OBS, which encodes the rtsp to rtmp and pushes to youtube.

Cool cameras TonyT

This is the only link that works for me, camera 1 offline now but watched yesterday for a bit, cam 2 runs for about 10 secs and then freezes

cybotron r_9 · Post by **cybotron r_9** » Sun Apr 08, 2018 11:48 am

TonyT wrote:Now using ffmpeg, an instance for each cam, to stream to youtube.
Seems stable so far.
Had a brain fart and realized why camera 2 stream is choppy.
Our TPLink access point and client are aimed correctly at each other, but we failed to take into consideration that last winter's ice moved the vertical positions of the posts these TPLinks are fastened to. Looks like another trip out on the water to straighten up the posts. Double 4x4 PT sunk about 6-8 feet in the mud.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_Vvx2 ... Y3Sw8IjA9w

1

This channel does not exist

MadDoctor · Post by **MadDoctor** » Sun Apr 08, 2018 2:23 pm

Pretty bird!!!!!!!

Easto · Post by **Easto** » Sun Apr 08, 2018 3:18 pm

It's working for me now.

TonyT · Post by **TonyT** » Sun Apr 08, 2018 4:26 pm

Had to go out on the water today and straighten out the post camera 1 is attached to. Then had to make adjustments to the controller for the solar panels and also tweak some ffmpeg settings to try to get the best quality streams. System was off and on many times today. It's on at this time (4:22 eastern) and we're now checking to see how stable the ffmpeg streams will be. Ideally, we'd be using a hardware decoder that streams the feeds, but decent ones start at around 1500 bucks and county govts don't want to put out such funds.

Post by **Philip** » Sun Apr 08, 2018 4:59 pm

Video stream quality/speed seems great to me as is now, the choppiness from a couple of days ago is gone.

TonyT · Post by **TonyT** » Mon Apr 09, 2018 8:05 am

Philip wrote:Video stream quality/speed seems great to me as is now, the choppiness from a couple of days ago is gone.

Yes is is! It ran all night too without any glitches. Seems to be getting more solid. The reason Camera 1 is a better pic is because it's a new cam at 4 megapixels. Camera 2 is 2 megapixels. Both stream at 1280x720, Caera 1 has a better cmos. Combined they are using about 4-4.5mb of the 25mb upload.

MadDoctor · Post by **MadDoctor** » Mon Apr 09, 2018 5:01 pm

TonyT wrote:Yes is is! It ran all night too without any glitches. Seems to be getting more solid. The reason Camera 1 is a better pic is because it's a new cam at 4 megapixels. Camera 2 is 2 megapixels. Both stream at 1280x720, Caera 1 has a better cmos. Combined they are using about 4-4.5mb of the 25mb upload.

Dumb'in it down to my level probably means pretty pictures?????

TonyT · Post by **TonyT** » Mon Apr 09, 2018 5:22 pm

Running 24 hrs now good and solid. Time to generate the invoice!

TonyT · Post by **TonyT** » Sun Apr 15, 2018 8:45 am

cybotron r_9 wrote:Cool cameras TonyT

This is the only link that works for me, camera 1 offline now but watched yesterday for a bit, cam 2 runs for about 10 secs and then freezes

Up and running stable for a week now.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_Vvx2 ... Y3Sw8IjA9w

cybotron r_9 · Post by **cybotron r_9** » Sun Apr 15, 2018 2:28 pm

TonyT wrote:Up and running stable for a week now.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_Vvx2 ... Y3Sw8IjA9w

Yep, I check in everyday... working well.