Adding night vision to my baby monitor

I use a wireless network camera as my baby monitor. I have the camera mounted over my son’s crib. The Axis 207w has audio capabilities, streams MJPEG and MPEG4, runs Linux and has a solid API which allows me to integrate it into my home automation system. The only problem with is this camera is that is can’t see in the dark. However, the camera does have a GPIO port on the back.  And I can use the camera’s API to control the GPIO port.

So I mounted an infrared LED to the side of the camera. The results are pretty good. I decided against removing the IR filter. Removing the IR filter would increase visibility in the dark, however I use this camera during day time hours as well, remove the IR filter would wash out the picture.

This was a pretty straight forward project. A resister needs to be added to the circuit. There are many good resistor calculators on-line.

For the 207w model the LED should be connected to pins 2 and 4. Be aware that the wired version of this camera (axis 207) uses different pins; so if you have that camera you’ll need to look up the pins yourself.

Once you have the camera wired up, you can turn the light on and off with the below URLs. Notice the the slashes.

Turn the LED off:

http://<camera address>/axis-cgi/io/output.cgi??action=1:\

Turn the LED on:

http://<camera address>/axis-cgi/io/output.cgi??action=1:/

One other note, I found the best way to stream mpeg video to my Linux box was to use mplayer.

mplayer rtsp://<username>:<password>@<IP>/mpeg4/media.amp