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 right now, we’re in an age where hardware crashes are rarer things. Computers are tougher, and are used as control hubs for countless robotic technologies, of which detection, recording and media-storage are some of the least logistically challenging. Setting up a DIY home security system is really not something to be intimidated by – home security camera systems can be constructed from the simple webcams people use to chat online, and, for a little more money, infrared security cameras can conquer issues of lighting and motion detection in the gloomier parts of your home.
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 your DIY home security system effort is going to include the rigging of a full-blown home security camera system, it’s possible to have your contacts serve as the activators for the recording function of your cameras. Thus your cameras will be set to record as soon as the contact circuit is broken and the perimeter of your fortress is breached. Truly, if the lighting in the house is decent, and you’re generally at home at night, there’s no reason to construct your home security camera system using anything more snazzy than a few good webcams. Webcams start at under $20, and go right up to the point of being far more accurate as regards color and contrast discrimination than the human eye.
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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