So I recently switched carriers (Sprint is awesome!) and picked up a Samsung Galaxy Note 2. Surprisingly my previous phone, a Motorola Droid 3, made it the whole 2 yrs and still worked perfectly. Normally I just sell my old phone on ebay or something and use that money to pay for my new phone. As it turns out the Droid 3 didn’t hold it’s value quite like the original Droid did.
Being a techie, I began to think what else can I do with it? It’s not exactly useless just because there’s no cell service on it, I mean it has wifi, bluetooth and a decent 1080p camera. We recently got a little puppy and I was thinking I wish I could monitor her when not in the room or even home. Then it hit me, a few weeks ago my brother telling me how there were some apps out for Android to turn a phone into an IP based web cam.
It took a little bit of toying around to find the right software for my needs and I always try to use free/open source software if possible. In the end I was able to not only come up with a completely free solution but a pretty robust one with motion detection and everything. I found IP Webcam for Android works very well for the camera portion and has a lot of features including username/password security, 1920 x 1080 support and a slew of other options. To view streams from another Android device I found tinyCAM Monitor FREE works very well and actually has support for recording to various storage locations and motion detection.
I wanted to have something a little more solid for recording though, and using another Android device wasn’t going to cut it. That’s when I found iSpy for Windows, which is completely free and open source. The software is so good it’s really hard to believe they offer it up for free! You can record multiple camera’s, set alerts, disk management, web access and all kind of other stuff.
That’s all it took! A little time and tinkering with the right software to completely re-purpose an old phone into a very useful security camera without spending a dime!
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