One week with Periscope

Of all the possible home automation features that one can implement, in my experience, the one that really catches the eye of most people is using a webcam to keep an eye on a pet, person, or property while they're away. Not only can it provide peace of mind, it's a high-tech trick that has a lot of "wow factor" appeal.

I normally use IP-based webcams for this task, as I've previously described in Home Petcam Made Easy but the expense, configuration hassle, and the difficulty of finding good Mac-support in this type of camera requires more effort than most people are willing to expend. "Besides", as I've heard many times, "most Macs have built-in iSight cameras, can't I just use that?" Yes, of course you can, as long as you're willing to position your Mac where it can "see" the area you want to observe. But beyond that, I hadn't tried any of the numerous applications that support this type of thing. Until a few weeks ago, that is.

I decided to try out the Macintosh-as-security-cam approach during a one week vacation. I wanted to see how one of the easiest and friendliest applications in this genre, Periscope from Freeverse Software, stood up to the task. I loaded it onto an iMac G5 that is equipped with an external iSight camera and positioned in the corner of my living room. Since I was having some work done on our home, I knew that there would be activity for it to capture while I was gone.

Periscope allows you to capture images in predefined intervals, such as every 5 minutes, but I opted for its motion-detecting abilities instead. I positioned the camera so it could see our stairway, then defined that region of the picture as the watch-area. I experimented with various motion sensitivity settings, which ultimately was a downfall as I'll discuss later, and configured Periscope to upload captured pictures to my .Mac account.

There are other options for distributing captured images, such as posting to a Flickr account, sending them via email, or uploading to a server using FTP. I decided to go with .Mac because of its super-easy setup and it meant I could easily check the captured images using any computer, or even my iPhone.

One of the smartest things I did when setting this up was configuring Periscope to add a timestamp over the top of the captured image. This was very useful because, to my frustration, it was sometimes difficult to tell if the image I was seeing via the .Mac web page was a new image. This is because that darned motion sensitivity setting I selected was a bit too sensitive and Periscope would snap a picture when the lighting in the room changed due to the rising Sun. The time stamp helped me determine that the application was uploading nearly identical pictures, every few minutes, during the morning hours.

The mis-configured sensitivity setting also proved frustrating when I discovered that it was causing Periscope to take six or seven pictures every time a worker crossed the camera's field of view. In theory this should be OK, but the .Mac upload option only places one photo—the latest one—on the web for you to view. In many cases that last captured image showed only a leg, or a swinging arm, captured just as the person left the frame. I could tell that something was happening back home, and when, but exactly who was working in my home was sometimes impossible to determine.

When I got back home, things got a lot less frustrating. I found that Periscope had dutifully captured over 7300 images during the week, many of them quite good and interesting. (I had it configured to save a copy of every image to the hard drive, in addition to uploading the latest picture to .Mac.) But as with any home monitoring system, you have to be prepared to discover things you don't necessarily want to know. For example, I learned that the painting crew borrowed our expensive living room floor lamp to use as a work light.

All in all, Periscope performed well. It did crash on the last day of our trip, which would have been very disappointing had it occurred earlier, so if I use it again I'll have to set up some sort of "watch dog" process to keep it running. I do wish it would allow access to more than just one image via .Mac, but I believe you can workaround that limitation by using one of its other upload options. If you're looking for a simple way to get a taste of home video monitoring, its inexpensive price make it a worthwhile application to try. If you're using a different application for this purpose, feel free to leave a comment and maybe I'll use it next time instead.