Front Door Camera Pop-up on TV?

BryanE

Active Member
We are trying to formulate the best solution to do the following:

When the front doorbell button is pressed, we would like a pop-up of who is at the front door to appear on any TV, which is turned on, throughout the house. Preferably for a specified duration.
We currently have a Russound CAV6.6 for a/v distribution and an 8 channel DVR.

I’m wondering if any of the CT users have implemented something similar to this. Are there any turnkey solutions? We would like to avoid using a PC for any part of the equation.

Thoughts or suggestions?
 
This has been part of my plans for a while but I haven't implemented it yet. It is going to be hard to do without a PC or other very flexible controller. You will need to sense the doorbell and turn on PIP on the tv's and select the input as the video feed from the camera. Depending on your current setup I can't say if you have the right video distribution in place to accomplish this. If you just wanted to switch the CAV6.6 to the camera feed for all outputs then it becomes an easier problem but still requires something that can control the CAV in response to the doorbell.
 
yeah, it's trivial to do with a PC. I do this, but witha touchscreen in my kitchen. The wife loves it.
 
I used to do this as well (lightning killed my equipment, haven't rebuilt that part yet). I had my CCTV going to a secondary input on my main TV. When driveway motion was detected, the Elk M1 would recognize this, and send an IR command through an Ocelot to turn on Picture-in-Picture/Twin-View using an IR blaster. Not an out of the box solution, but doesn't require a PC, and worked well.
 
I used to do this as well (lightning killed my equipment, haven't rebuilt that part yet). I had my CCTV going to a secondary input on my main TV. When driveway motion was detected, the Elk M1 would recognize this, and send an IR command through an Ocelot to turn on Picture-in-Picture/Twin-View using an IR blaster. Not an out of the box solution, but doesn't require a PC, and worked well.

This is very similar to the approach I had envisioned, although I didn’t even think about using an Ocelot for IR. I was actually considering a URC MSC-400, which can interface with the CAV6.6 via RS232.

It’s great to hear your approach worked well. I was a little concerned about using IR to initiate PIP. The Elk / Ocelot combination is something I will definitely look into. Did you build a timer to deactivate the PIP? Is the Ocelot still well supported?
 
We are trying to formulate the best solution to do the following:

When the front doorbell button is pressed, we would like a pop-up of who is at the front door to appear on any TV, which is turned on, throughout the house. Preferably for a specified duration.
We currently have a Russound CAV6.6 for a/v distribution and an 8 channel DVR.

I’m wondering if any of the CT users have implemented something similar to this. Are there any turnkey solutions? We would like to avoid using a PC for any part of the equation.

Thoughts or suggestions?

sorry ... my solution uses a pc...

I have this working. I split the door-cam off to a cheap philips switch box that has a built in RF modulator. This lets me put the picture on either channel 3 or 4. I then feed that over to my LCD TV on the coax ant. input. I've set up PIP on the TV with channel 3 from the RF modulator. This lets me pop up the video via PIP.

I use Homeseer with a usb-uirt and the ultramon plugin. My TV is IP enabled with both wireless and wired connections. It so happens that the TV ceases to respond to pings when it's off. This lets me use ultramon to track the status of the TV. I have an event setup that triggers on door-bell ring. The event has a condition that requires the TV be off. If it is off, the TV is turned on via IR (through the USB-UIRT) and the PIP is popped up for 60 seconds. It then turns the TV back off. There is a limiter that ensures the event is never run more than once every few minutes (in case someone keeps pressing your doorbell.. don't want to ruin the TV)

I have another event that just displays the PIP if the TV is on and does not turn the TV off. I have another event that lets me manually toggle PIP. That way if I am sitting in front of the TV, I can just pull up the camera if I want to.

-sphiend
 
I used to do this as well (lightning killed my equipment, haven't rebuilt that part yet). I had my CCTV going to a secondary input on my main TV. When driveway motion was detected, the Elk M1 would recognize this, and send an IR command through an Ocelot to turn on Picture-in-Picture/Twin-View using an IR blaster. Not an out of the box solution, but doesn't require a PC, and worked well.

This is very similar to the approach I had envisioned, although I didn’t even think about using an Ocelot for IR. I was actually considering a URC MSC-400, which can interface with the CAV6.6 via RS232.

It’s great to hear your approach worked well. I was a little concerned about using IR to initiate PIP. The Elk / Ocelot combination is something I will definitely look into. Did you build a timer to deactivate the PIP? Is the Ocelot still well supported?
Officially the Ocelot isn't supported, but you can communicate with the Ocelot using simple ASCII messages when the Ocelot is hooked up to an Elk M1 XSP serial port expander, so that's what I did. I did set a timer, and it worked pretty well. The Elk M1 and the Ocelot are a very powerful combination, as you can offload some of the analog sensors which might require complex timers/routines from the M1 to the Ocelot, and communicate the results via simple ASCII messages. It saves memory and cpu resource on the M1 as well.
 
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