Have been playing around with a method of monitoring a back door at work, short of buying an actual wifi or USB web cam and hooking it to a PC I was curious about using an old iPhone I've had laying around only being used as an iPod.
Since it has wifi access and a great camera, I started looking into apps or services to allow not only viewing inside your home or office network but one that could be routed via the outside world and viewed from a web browser.
I tried one named "Instant Webcam" from the app store. Does what you'd expect, easily but only uses port 80(which isn't easily routable for port forwarding since it's the default port used surfing internet) and it tended to drop the connection and crash the app.
The one I have come to prefer is called Web of Cam, available for iPhone and Android. It uses port 8080(perfect), is more stable, can be installed as the camera or in viewer mode(via another i device or Android phone or tablet.)
Best of all, the page can be password locked from the phone requiring login to the stream, and you can rotate the image once you're in the browser, which allows for more choice of phone orientation.
The port forwarding is not difficult at all(maybe considering I'm a network administrator) but you can search Youtube etc for instructions on how to forward a port to IP address for just about any type of home router.
Unless you have a static IP, you will then also want to use some sort ofdynamic DNS service, most are simple to set up and relatively cheap. And once configured, you can the forward any number of services directly to your PC... Remote Desktop, Web server traffic, FTP etc.
The Dynamic DNS service I used is http://dyn.com/dns/ again, not even necessary if you only want to view the iphone(camera) on the same network via web browser, iPad, other phone etc.
The only other thing you need to consider is running power to the phone, as the most I've gotten is about 6 hours battery life on a full charge.
Could be a handy project for keeping an eye on deer camp.
I have mine running right now. Feel free to take a peek a my back yard.... don't let the shade fool ya, it's a hot sombeech out there.
enjoy.
Note: If anyone else can recommend a similar app(that doesn't require an additional service), please share. I like this one ok, but not entirely sure yet how many simultaneous connections it takes to crash it.
Since it has wifi access and a great camera, I started looking into apps or services to allow not only viewing inside your home or office network but one that could be routed via the outside world and viewed from a web browser.
I tried one named "Instant Webcam" from the app store. Does what you'd expect, easily but only uses port 80(which isn't easily routable for port forwarding since it's the default port used surfing internet) and it tended to drop the connection and crash the app.
The one I have come to prefer is called Web of Cam, available for iPhone and Android. It uses port 8080(perfect), is more stable, can be installed as the camera or in viewer mode(via another i device or Android phone or tablet.)
Best of all, the page can be password locked from the phone requiring login to the stream, and you can rotate the image once you're in the browser, which allows for more choice of phone orientation.
The port forwarding is not difficult at all(maybe considering I'm a network administrator) but you can search Youtube etc for instructions on how to forward a port to IP address for just about any type of home router.
Unless you have a static IP, you will then also want to use some sort ofdynamic DNS service, most are simple to set up and relatively cheap. And once configured, you can the forward any number of services directly to your PC... Remote Desktop, Web server traffic, FTP etc.
The Dynamic DNS service I used is http://dyn.com/dns/ again, not even necessary if you only want to view the iphone(camera) on the same network via web browser, iPad, other phone etc.
The only other thing you need to consider is running power to the phone, as the most I've gotten is about 6 hours battery life on a full charge.
Could be a handy project for keeping an eye on deer camp.
I have mine running right now. Feel free to take a peek a my back yard.... don't let the shade fool ya, it's a hot sombeech out there.
enjoy.
Note: If anyone else can recommend a similar app(that doesn't require an additional service), please share. I like this one ok, but not entirely sure yet how many simultaneous connections it takes to crash it.
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