Friday 20 May 2011

EasyN FS-613 webcam installation

I wanted a cheap webcam to monitor the rear of our house, from the reviews on Amazon I chose the EasyN FS-613 webcam although the Amazon page didn't identify it. These are my installation notes in case they are of help to someone. If you look hard enough you can find a label on the packaging that says FS-613A but otherwise the camera is identified as an F-series.

First steps
Plug in network cable to router
Plug in power cable
Turn on at the wall (no on/off switch on the camera) and it tracks around, presumably as a self test
Check on router - camera had correctly set its IP to 192.168.1.126 - this is also marked on the bottom of the camera for those who don't want to read the manual.


Basic settings
I don't run Windows so didn't use the software provided, instead I did it the "hard" way - which is actually very simple on a standard network.
Go to 192.168.1.126:81 in Google Chrome. Default logon is admin with no password.

You are then presented with camera control choices:
ActiveX for IE
Server push for Firefox, Chrome
Javascript for Mobile
or a dedicated ipad option
Using Chrome so used server push, camera worked straightaway.


Network settings
Click on the options button on the web page control.
Set password for admin (not forced to do so but really necessary) and one other user (not necessary). Camera will reboot.

Changed camera IP to 192.168.1.252 port 81. It reboots again.

Set wireless details, another reboot. Remove network cable. No problem connecting on my WPA2 wireless network.

And that is it on the camera itself, that's all you need to do if you want to monitor via your own network.


Additional settings
There were some other changes I needed to make on my system to use with my camera monitoring software and to allow external viewing. For some of these you can use the webcam's own software - eg dynamic dns, alarm settings.


External viewing
Port forwarding on router (Linksys WRT610N)
External port 50001 maps to 192.168.1.252 port 81

I use DynDNS to provide a static URL for external viewing of my network. The router handles the updating of the IP address.

Monitoring software
Zoneminder
My webcam monitoring software running on the Ubuntu server.

Add new monitor - obvious settings except for path to images is path /snapshot.cgi?1305894863217

and image size 320x240. Will test to see if other options.

Restart Zoneminder (though I also had to reboot my server for some reason).

IP Cam viewer
A brilliant Android monitoring program with a very responsive developer and well worth the £3 cost of the full version.

Again all obvious settings - there is only one choice for an EasyN webcam (the FS-613) and it seems to work fine.

Haven't tested the visual side yet!

3 comments:

  1. Edit: path in Zoneminder should be:

    /videostream.cgi?resolution=8&rate=13

    ReplyDelete
  2. I appreciate the information you're sharing. I'm having a bit of trouble getting the same camera to work with zoneminder (although my model is apparently fs-613a-m136). The only luck I've had is setting the source type to ffmpeg and the source path to http://192.168.1.131/videostream.asf?user=admin&pwd=&resolution=640*480

    That only gets me around 5fps (but the cpu load never goes over 7%, so maybe the framerate is an issue unrelated to ZoneMinder). What source type did you select?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Matt

    I've got source type set to remote. Remote host path is /videostream.cgi?resolution=8&rate=13. Remote host name is admin:password@ipaddress. Remote host port is 81. I have max frame rate set to 5fps, which is more than enough for my needs.

    Hope this helps. My main problem is still getting the wifi to consistently stay connected but I think that is unrelated to the camera itself.

    ReplyDelete