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.
You should keep in mind, before you get too caught up in building a DIY home security system that turns your home into a hi-tech fortress, that the most effective form of crime prevention is really simple common sense. More than half of all burglaries occur as the result of negligence - someone leaving a door or window open, or forgetting to put the alarm on. Make sure that your spouse, children, and any other residents of your home are set in the ritual of locking doors whenever they leave, even if it's only to run a quick errand.
Building on this, you'll need to think about installing contact sensors at all of your access points - your doors, windows and so forth. These are paired electromagnetic pads which, once separated, trip a switch which in turn activates your alarm siren and brings the cops running. You secure one of them to the door or window, and one to the frame, and run a cable from the contact to a powerpoint. They're truly ideal for building DIY home security systems because they're cheap, easy to install, and are readily available in hardware stores.
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 , 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 00. 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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