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Hi there,

Today I had a rather disturbing surprise. Someone threw a chemical compound in our post box. Now we would like to hang a cam that works much like the one used in bwired, with the difference that when someone stands in front of the door (motion activated) a picture is taken.

Can anyone give me some advice which equipment would be best suited for this?

Many thanks!

Kind regards,
Shariff

Hi Shariff welcome to the forum,

That's some nasty business to find in your mailbox. If you have a domotica setup, with something like Homeseer it would be quite easy to setup with some X10/Visonic + a camera. But I'm gonna assume you don't have such a setup, so a simpler solution could require something like this:

- an IP camera (e.g. Axis, Mobotix or much cheaper cams)
- a local or remote FTP-server/ mail account
- (optional) a motion sensor with a trigger output. (Have a look at Conrad.nl/.de)

A decent IP camera has features in it, like motion detection and e-mail sending/FTP uploading. With this, when motion is detected, the camera will upload pictures e.g. to the FTP you defined. Optionally to increase reliability, if the camera has trigger inputs (lots of Axis cameras have this, for example) you could connect a motion or IR sensor with 'trigger output' to the camera and do detection that way.

Camera-wise there are lots of options. It depends on budget, night/day, available light, location of the camera(inside/outside), wired/wireless. For some ideas on cameras have a look in the forum's camera repository:
http://www.domoticaforum.eu/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=2482