Thread: Low power consumption 24/7 video recorder?

Well, I couldnt find any better system that would meet my needs of low power consumption and automatic loop recording. So I just pulled the trigger and bought the sd dvr:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...MEWN:IT&ih=012

and a cctv camera (I hope those are real ir leds):

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...MEWN:IT&ih=018

Also bought some lm317 voltage regulators so that I can hook them up in the car. Total cost is just a little over $100CAD. The whole system should draw under 5 watts and will be run from my auxiliary deep cycle battery. Although having a high frame rate would be great, I think I will just set the system to automatically take pictures when there is motion. Hope this works.

great...can post some sample video once u got it?

Sure, if I remember. It's shipping from China...so will probably take a while.

I was wondering if any electronic gurus would have a good recommendation to efficiently regulate the voltage from 12v to 9v and 5v to power the recorder and camera. I am most familiar with the lm317 chip, but that seems to dissipate the extra voltage as heat. I would prefer something as efficient as possible. Every watt counts, as I am running on battery.

Not sure how efficient your chips are but these guys are designed for decent efficiency.
http://www.hvwtech.com/products_view.asp?ProductID=585
company is also located in calgary as well.

Thanks for the info, thats exactly what I am looking for. Although I will probably try eBay for some cheaper adjustable switching type regulators.

Ok everything just came in, so I thought Id give a update and share some footage to demonstrate this setup.

Dont have time to install it in the car yet, so I just slowly swept the camera around my computer area. The device can be setup for motion detection and record video or take pictures. I have attached to this post what it looks like with the cheap eBay camera attached. Ive attached both captures in video mode and picture mode.

I also wanted to measure the power consumption, but it maxed out my multimeter. So I attached a 1ohm resistor inline, measured the voltage drop, and calculated that the camera + dvr consumes about 3.1W @ 12V.

I definitely think perhaps my cheap camera is the limiting factor for this setup. I have hooked the device directly to a cable box, and you can see the quality is noticeably better. I have attached the video and pictures of when the input is from a cable box. Although I can set it to record at 30fps, right now its set at 5fps to save memory.

If anyone has suggestions on how to improve this setup, comments are welcome.

It does seem much better with the cable setup vs. the camera. Even still, I don't think the camera is horrible. Much better than any security footage I've seen.