The term ‘DIY home security system’ probably, for most people, calls to mind the image of a young McCaulay Culkin, beating the heck of the marauding crooks in Home Alone I and II. Of course, Home Alone was an early 90′s phenomenon, popular in a time when auto-detection, visual and information technology were, despite decades of concerted effort, in their infancy, and something only qualified systems engineers or genius geeks could really do with as they pleased.
But computers have traveled light years in the past couple of decades. Hardware glitches, though still not a thing of the past, are far rarer, and operating technologies such as media recording and storage and motion detection is now a fairly simple business, accessible to anyone with the time to skim through a short user manual or do a little browsing on the internet. You can, believe it or not, actually build pretty efficient DIY home security systems using simple webcams of the sort people use to chat online. With a little more cash in hand, you can even override issues of poor lighting by installing your own infrared security cameras.
Remember, though, that more than half of all burglaries in North America happen due to negligence, when a window or door is left standing open, and the alarm system left off. Thus, before you get too technical and fancy building home security camera systems, concentrate on your low-tech barriers against intruders. Make sure you have sturdy locks, burglar bars over your windows, and that you and your whole family are habitually obsessed with keeping doors and windows locked even should you just be stepping out to visit your neighbors. Remember that you, as the caretaker of your DIY home security system, remain its most critical element.
Your next move is to have those doors or windows set off the alarm if they are somehow opened when you’re not there. Your tool in this regard? Alarm contacts. These magnetic pads, one of which is secured to the door or window and the other to its frame, create a circuit that gets tripped when broken. When the circuit gets tripped, it will emit a signal to the central alarm system hub to which the contacts are tuned. Contacts are cheap – you can buy them for under ten dollars at just about any hardware store – making them ideal for creating a good DIY home security system.
If you’ve decided to rig up a full-fledge home security camera system as part of your DIY effort, you could arrange your contacts in such a way that they’ll activate your security cameras, setting them to record as soon as the circuit is broken. For DIY home security systems, there’s no reason to get anything more sophisticated than a webcam to act as your security camera. These can be had for under $20, and are widely available in department stores and through computer supply chains.
Going infrared, by contrast, can be a very costly business. While the cameras are down from their 1970s pricing (which had them at around fifty thousand adjusted US dollars) those available from FLIR, the pioneering infrared security camera company, still bottom out at the, some might say, prohibitive price of $2000. The benefits of infrared security cameras are, however, definitely not something to be sniffed at. They can record detailed, high quality footage even in complete darkness. This they do by the use of microbolometers, which read off the black body radiation of objects (which, relating to heat, is something humans and animals have a lot more of than, say, furniture or walls).
Integrating infrared security cameras into your DIY home security system would also eliminate the need for smoke sensors and, by rendering your home security camera system immune from changes in atmospheric conditions, bring it firmly into the 21st century.
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