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Wednesday April 29 2015 Daily Update

MT
Matt Transue
Apr 29, 2015

Emails with student regarding final and resubmits throughout the day (lots of emails from students today)

Graded finals and processed resubmits for students, and processed all resubmits currently waiting for rescoring.

There were a lot of finals and resubmits to grade by the end of the day today.

Call with Brian to fix the GoToMeeting webinar link and meeting times for the wrap-up sessions (morning and evening). Discussed most commonly missed questions for review in class.

Reviewed class deck for IP Networking wrap up sessions.

Conducted IP Networking finals wrap up morning course with Brian. I will also be on this evening’s wrap-up session with Brian.

Looked into a wireless question from a student regarding sensitivity level vs. available bandwidth. I don’t know much about wireless details, so I’ve solicited Ethan for help. Will discuss with him when available and reach back out to the student.

Reviewed Michael’s press release for the Google Maps Camera Calculator. The press release looked good to me. There seems to be a lot of positive feedback on this!

Reviewed PPF deck for tomorrow’s camera class, made changes and edits. Sent back to Brian for review. Will discuss changes with him today or tomorrow.

Some quick finals stats:

As of today, for my portion of the students we’ve had:

  • 45 students passed
  • 7 we are waiting to resubmit answers
  • 7 who have failed
  • 38 who did not submit the final by the deadline (including extension)

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Derek Ward
Apr 29, 2015
Hanwha

Setup the Eagle Eye bridge with Ethan. My takeaways are:
- Only supports a handle of listed manufacturers. Cameras are found automatically, with no way to manually add cameras.
- Uses RTSP streams to connect cameras, and ONVIF needs to be enabled for cameras to connect (can be an issue with certain cameras, a la Axis, where ONVIF is not automatically set to "ON")
- Features seem buried under non-intuitive menus. For example, playback is not featured in it's own main tab.
- Strange PR/demo of a sixth grader setting up Eagle Eye products...

Flir Thermal preliminary testing began.

Posted Bulletproof Hat Discussion.

Took a look for larger dollys to hold some of our larger testing tripods. Sadly, none that I found would hold our large/heavy dollies.

Mailed the Genetec AutoVu camera that was not successfully mailed the first time. Submitted a claim to get a refund for the DHL return, and cost for shipping Fedex international was 122.60.

P.S. I'm taking the outdoor FLIR FX camera with me to see how it performs in an outdoor nighttime real-world setting.

JH
John Honovich
Apr 29, 2015
IPVM

I can't believe they really had a six grader do it...

In my experience from the VMS/NVR side, building a complete system takes a huge amount of time, there's so many 'little things' that are taken for granted until you try to do one from scratch and then you realize how many are missing.

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Ethan Ace
Apr 30, 2015

Today:

Eagle Eye

Setup and familiarizing, plus an hour on the phone for a walkthrough and some prelim questions. Actually going to disagree with most of what Derek says up there...I'm not even sure where some of this came from.

- Only supports a handle of listed manufacturers. -- Actually "a handful" is inaccurate. That's just what they list in the manual: http://www.eagleeyenetworks.com/support/camera-compatibility/ -- 24 listed, but they said this isn't up to date. They only allow you to use cameras which they have tested, for the most part. It is not ONVIF conformant. It does use the ONVIF discovery process to find the cameras' stream locations, but then just uses RTSP.

Their justification for their supported camera list was that they are testing and guaranteeing performance of all these cameras, including streaming settings. They say some manufacturers (Axis) are more predictable than others, but still they want to test them. There are some manufacturers which may work fine without testing, but others they simply don't allow because of too many differences in firmware. It's a logical argument, but I'm not completely sold on it.

I will give them credit because I submitted the FLIR TCX as a driver request, and it's done already. Granted, it was a Dahua camera so they just had to tweak it, but they seem very responsive. I think honestly they are connecting to things, finding their RTSP streams, and then tweaking them to work. So it's not like building a full-blown direct driver. I submitted an unsupported Hik model so we'll see how long that takes.

- Cameras are found automatically, with no way to manually add cameras. -- True. And this seems a silly omission. But their justification is that really the bridge is supposed to feed IP addresses to camera, which it will then automatically discover. The camera LAN port runs a DHCP server, similar to the Dahua/Q-See NVRs we've tested. For a turnkey plug and play system, I don't think it's a horrible choice, but people accustomed to larger systems aren't used to it.

- Uses RTSP streams to connect cameras, and ONVIF needs to be enabled for cameras to connect (can be an issue with certain cameras, a la Axis, where ONVIF is not automatically set to "ON") -- Kind of true. Axis cameras actually do have ONVIF on by default, until you set a root password. They pointed this out to me. I actually didn't know it. I can't think of another manufacturer that does this, so it's a moot point, especially considering Eagle Eye tells you up front they support only what they support.

- Features seem buried under non-intuitive menus. For example, playback is not featured in it's own main tab. -- It's not on its own tab, but I don't think it's a dealbreaker. It's on an overlay button in each camera, and there is no multi-camera playback, so what would be the purpose of putting it on its own tab? Also what other features do you think are buried under non-intuitive menus? Why?

FLIR TCX

Performance varied here. We set it up to learn the scene against an Avigilon bullet connected ot the Rialto. At first, it detected nothing. Then we went back out after my call with Eagle Eye and it detected Derek walking out from the camera to about 200', about a 90' HFOV. Walking in, it was ~130' ultimately, which is about a 60' FOV, and what they claim.

But then we changed things slightly (moved it inches to the left) and it barely detected at all. In fact video was demonstrably worse. I'm wondering if the sensor wasn't heating up from being out in the sun and losing contrast. We will try it again tomorrow. Indoors, it was working fine when I had it set up by my desk before we started formally testing. I'm thinking the sun had to have something to do with it.

Also I am going to test its internal motion detection in parallel with the Rialto. Maybe it's triggering when the Rialto isn't. Testing something with contrast this low on a sunny day is hard, and it was difficult to see Derek walking around out there at times.

Other

- Tatung installation tool comes tomorrow.

- Got answers back from Genetec on GTAC health monitoring and free cloud, but haven't done anything with them yet.

- RMA's our Q1615. Axis hasn't seen the issues we're having. Sent us an advance replacement already, which should arrive in a day or two.

- Matt, I'll take a look at that wifi question and let you know in the morning. I may be slightly confused, too.

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Brian Rhodes
Apr 30, 2015
IPVMU Certified

Goals

- Graded many exams. We are down to <15 resubmits in the networking class. I will finish it out from here, Matt.

- Two wrap-up sessions today

Tomorrow

- Finish grounding post

- Class 8 - PPF

- Get with Matt about May Networking class

- Assemble labor survey posts for Benros

- Email certifieds update to Benros

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