New Toys: Motorized IP Cameras!

Budget IP Cams for the Observatory (and a MAC Address Hack!)

Guess what arrived yesterday? My two motorized IP cameras, ordered about ten days ago from Hong Kong via Dealextreme!

These are IP cams (Ethernet + WiFi, and even night vision!) that are destined for the observatory. The only tiny hiccup I ran into during my initial tests: these budget-friendly cameras have a common flaw – they all ship with the exact same Ethernet card, meaning the same MAC address!

The problem, of course, is that on a local network, two devices with identical MAC addresses will clash and simply won’t play nice – or at all. My workaround was pretty simple: just connect one camera via Ethernet cable and the other via WiFi. Thankfully, the integrated Ethernet and WiFi modules have distinct MAC addresses.

Overall, the cameras work quite well and are surprisingly easy to manage. You just connect to one of them, and it gives you access to all connected cameras, making control super easy without constantly switching windows.

UPDATE (Feb 21, 2010): The cameras are now happily installed in the observatory. Everything’s running like a charm!