Eight cameras

June 14, 2020.  As of yesterday, we now have eight cameras at the construction site.  Here are some random thoughts about the eight cameras in particular and the construction progress in general.

Maybe you already have a user ID and password that permit you to view this on your smart phone.  If you don’t already have such a user ID and password and would like to have it, please feel free to get in touch.

Concrete pigment.  As you will see on the first floor, the concrete floor has been poured.  This happened on Friday the 12^th.  It is colored with iron oxide pigment from Davis Colors.  Davis Colors has a stunningly poorly designed web site.  Only after very persistent clicking and puzzling over the fine print can a person work out the meaning of the following “colors” on their web site:

1. 1. 1. Dark grey (carbon)
      2. Dark grey (iron oxide)
      3. Graphite (carbon)
      4. Graphite (iron oxide)
      5. Jet black (carbon)
      6. Jet black (iron oxide)
      7. Light grey (carbon)
      8. Light grey (iron oxide)
      9. Silversmoke (carbon)
      10. Silversmoke (iron oxide)

A first thing is that you can click around on these ten colors and for each one, you can drill down to reach eventually a color photograph of a physical tile of actual concrete that has been pigmented to be that color.  You might think that the physical tile for color 1 (dark grey) and color 2 (also dark grey) would be about the same color.  But if so, you would be wrong.  The photographs that appear on the web site for these two colors show actual concrete tiles of strikingly different shades of grey.  This is so even though on an earlier page of the web site, the colors 1 and 2 are shown (in RGB portrayal) as identical colors.

Eventually what the persistent web site visitor might be able to work out by clicking in each and every place where it is possible to click, and by taking notes, and by constructing a table with many rows and columns, is that the Davis Colors company does not for example sell one pigment that makes “Jet black” happen and a different pigment that makes “Silversmoke” happen.  Instead, the idea is that at the concrete plant, the concrete plant operator keeps an inventory of a single pigment.  And it is just that differing proportions of the pigment are metered into the concrete when it gets mixed, depending on the particular color that the customer said they wanted.  As an example if you pick “Light grey” then 2½ pounds of the iron oxide pigment powder would get mixed in with each 94-pound sack of cement.  Or if you pick “Dark grey” then 5 pounds of the iron oxide pigment powder would get mixed in with each 94-pound sack of cement.

Which gets us to the next aspect of this.  The color “Light grey” is just an arbitrary name for the 2½-pound position of some rotary dial on a control panel.  For this floor we decided to take a walk on the wild side and we specified that the knob should be set at 3¾.  We learned that at the concrete plant they call this “Medium grey” even though such a color name appears nowhere on the web site of the Davis Colors company.  It’s all very arbitrary.  I guess we could have specified that the knob be set at 3⅛ and maybe the concrete plant person might have called this “Sort of light-to-medium grey”.

So the ranking and meaning of the colors is:

• • • Silversmoke (1¼)
    • Light grey (2½)
    • Dark grey (5)
    • Jet black (7½)
    • Graphite (10)

Each of the numbers in parentheses is the dial setting assuming the pigment being uses is the iron oxide pigment.  (Oh and by the way I would have assumed that “Jet black” means the darkest of the dark colors, but no, apparently in the color word salad used by Davis Colors, there is a blacker-than-black color and that color is named “graphite”.)

From the Davis Colors web site the persistent visitor will eventually work out that apparently Davis has two ways of achieving the five colors enumerated above, or said differently, the ten colors enumerated above are actually supposedly only five colors.  The idea is that any particular concrete plant operator might choose to keep in inventory either the iron oxide pigment (which Davis calls “860”) or the carbon pigment (which Davis calls “8084”).    The carbon pigment has a higher “specific color” content in the sense that one pound of the 8084 pigment supposedly achieves the same color results as five pounds of the 860 pigment.  I have to imagine that any particular concrete plant would only stock one pigment or the other, but not both.  And I would imagine that it would be preferable to stock the carbon pigment since it would take up less storage space.  We wondered which pigment was going to be used by our local concrete provider.  What we learned, by asking our contractor Gordy who asked his concrete subcontractor Ruben who asked the concrete plant operator, is that our provider stocks the much more bulky iron oxide pigment.  Go figure.

Anyway you can see in camera number 5 the results.  It is more like the “Graphite” color on the Davis Colors web site.   What actually happened is approximately the Graphite color.  With the knob set at 3¾, we somehow ended up with the color that you would have gotten if the knob had been set at 10.  I have to wonder if maybe the operator of the concrete plant was confused and if the pigment stocked there was actually the carbon pigment and not the iron oxide pigment.

There is one more thing about what the floors will hopefully eventually look like.  The plan is that months from now, when most of the work on the house is done, a final finish will be applied to the floors with a finely divided mica mixed into a clear coating.  This will hopefully give a bit of “pop” or sparkle to the floor.

Heat pipes.  In cameras 6, 7 and 8 you can see heat pipes stapled into place on the plywood flooring.  These will eventually provide in-floor heating with four heating zones on the first floor and seven heating zones on the second floor.  The boiler will also have a twelfth zone providing heat to the water heater.

Septic tank.  Camera 4 shows the septic tank, with its three chambers.  The nearest chamber is the dosing tank.

Bluebird house.  Camera 3 allows you to see a very nice bird house that has some bluebird chicks that have just hatched.

Cameras 5-8 look different from cameras 1-4.  Older cameras 1-4 came with the video server system.  Those cameras are made by the same company (LaView)  that made the server.  Newer cameras 5-8 are much less expensive cameras made by different company (JideTech).  It took a bit of reading the manual for me to figure out how to convince the newer cameras to talk with the server and to convince the server to talk with the cameras.  The main things that I had to figure out were:

• • • the new cameras had to be powered by a POE ethernet switch rather than being powered by the video server’s camera ports;
    • the new cameras had to be told to use DHCP;
    • the DHCP server had to be told to assign fixed IP addresses to the MAC addresses of the new cameras;
    • the video server had to be told the fixed IP addresses of the four new cameras;
    • the video server had to be told to use the ONVIF protocol when communicating with the new cameras;  and
    • the video server had to be told the default user name and default password of the new cameras.

These things having been figured out, you now get to see new cameras 5-8 in addition to the original cameras 1-4.

ONVIF.  What permitted me to add the very inexpensive cameras 5-8 rather than having to purchase four more very expensive brand-name cameras for positions 5-8 was the existence of the ONVIF protocol (Wikipedia article).  The fetchingly named ONVIF is an acronym for “Open Network Video Interface Forum”.

Night mode.  Each of the  eight cameras has the ability to go into “night mode” and each is configured to do so automatically when it gets dark.  In night mode, the following things happen:

• • • the camera turns on a bank of infrared LEDs to light up the field of view even in the dark;
    • the camera opens an IR (infrared) shutter permitting incoming IR light to reach the imaging array;  and
    • The imaging array switches to a monochrome (black and white) data gathering mode.

Later when it gets bright again, the camera turns off night mode automatically.  The IR LEDs turn off, the shutter closes so that IR light is blocked from the array and only visible light reaches the imaging array, and data gathering at the array returns to ordinary three-color (RGB) data gathering.

The night mode function leads to what will seem very odd to you if you look at the camera views at night.  You will have the impression that someone must have left some very bright lights on at the construction site in the middle of the night.   If you were there in person, it would not look like this at all.  The construction site would be very dark, with only a very faint red glow from the IR LEDs on the eight cameras.  But each of these cameras, when in night mode, is sending out a floodlight beam of bright IR light.  And there are many instances where one camera is able to see the floodlight beam emitted by another camera.  So there are many instances where, from one camera, it looks like there is a bright visible light turned on in the field of view.

Power over ethernet.   Each of the eight cameras uses power over ethernet (blog article).   This means that a single cable provides both the data connection and the power connection for the camera.   Indeed only four wires (two pairs) are needed to provide both power and data to one camera.  So a single Category 5 data cable containing four pairs of wire is able to provide all connections needed for two cameras.  There are four cameras inside the house and only two cat 5 cables are needed to power those four cameras.  A first cat 5 cable is buried in a trench to the house along the sanitary drain line;  that cable serves cameras 5 and 6.   A second cat 5 cable is buried in a trench to the house along the natural gas drop line;  that cable serves cameras 7 and 8.