It's that time of the year, and 2am already.
I'm doing regular checks of the lambing shed, but wouldn't it be nice if I could just wake up in bed, check a CCTV camera and then pull the duvet back up round my ears if there's nothing happening?
"Yes!" I hear you reply. "But lambing cameras are *soooo* expensive". Have no fear though - necessity and lambing induced insomnia truly are the mother(s) of invention. Do you have an old smartphone lying in a drawer somewhere, or can you get hold of one?
If so, it turns out that all you need to supervise the lambing shed from the warmth of your own duvet is to download a remote camera app (baby monitor / home security type of thing) onto the old phone (which becomes the camera), do the same on your current phone (or laptop) and then connect the two together via the app.
We're lucky in that our wifi just reaches as far as the shed and we have power in there to keep the camera charged, which makes the whole thing free. If you don't have those, you'd need to buy a data sim and a charger working off a car battery or similar.
Anyway, the app I used is called "
Alfred Camera", and was really easy to set up. All I had to do was to download the app onto both phones, and then make sure both phones were signed into Google with the same account, before signing both onto our house wifi. I then plugged the camera phone into a charger and rigged up a simple holder for it (see attached photo).
I can now watch and listen from the comfort of my own duvet, can turn the remote camera on and off, can change the view mode (e.g. there's a low-light night optimised mode) and can even record short video segments if I really want to (again, screenshots are attached to give you an idea of the quality).
Anyway, I just thought this might be of interest to folks on here. I won't say it's perfect (the main drawback is that there's no night vision, so if you don't have lights in your lambing shed, it's not going to work at night), but for me, it's certainly good enough, and worth what I paid for it
.HTH!
Topic: Remote lambing / calving camera - for free, or very nearly! (Read 1923 times)
