What’s your solution for remote deck monitoring for liquid handlers?
I’ve been at a company using Verkada cameras with a custom mount onto the deck before, but I’m now at a smaller company now and definitely not looking to spend $1k/yr.
I have a ring camera mounted via 3M tape on the ergotron arm for our Biomek that kind of works but the resolution is pretty bad to see well-level detail.
Any suggestions for a budget friendly off-the shelf solution?
We’ve been setting a bunch of these up lately. 3D printed covers for them. Maybe not computer vision grade, but useful for monitoring. We also had some IT constraints and could not have microphones or any cloud streaming services.
Hat tip to Reed Kelso for the suggestion originally.
Get a higher quality pet monitoring camera. Some can run off SIM cards and don’t even need Wifi.
These:
Local environment for playback. Just cut a hole in the acrylic of the Hamilton and surface mount, easy peasy. 1080p sensor does better in low light FYI
In my past I’ve used the Ubiquiti UniFi G3 Flex camera with the CloudKey NVR as an easy setup. I generally put one on camera on each front strut of a Hamilton STAR looking into the deck at a slight angle. I posted about it a few years ago here but to recap:
I used the small camera, the Ubiquiti G3 Flex and I mounted it on inside the front left-hand and right-hand struts of the STAR. I mounted them using industrial strength Velcro.
To do it, I moved the gantry of the STAR to the far right-hand side and placed the camera inside on the strut to find the clearance height. I marked that and then repeated that for the left one (with the MPH moved to the front of the STAR, if applicable). To get the angle of the deck from the left and the right, affix one part of the Velcro to the side of the camera so that when the camera is facing into the STAR, its kinda of on its side (not the back) so that you’re looking in at an angle. Repeat for the other side of the STAR. For the cameras, I used the loop part of the Velcro.
Some tips:
-Use a good POE injector switch for each system (or if your systems are close, you can use one for both)
-Upgrade the HDD in CloudKey Gen2 to a 5TB drive to extend record time
-Use different color CAT5e/CAT6 cables going to the camera so that you can tell the video LAN apart from the lab LAN
-Use recording schedules to extend recording time
-Use the web interface for remote managementOverall its an easy and simple setup. The Uniquiti server just "finds’ the cameras unless your LAN is partitioned, then you’ll probably need to loop in IT for help finding the IP addresses of the cameras.
No major modifications at all with this setup! If you have integrated devices hanging off the LHS or RHS of the instrument then you’ll have an even better set of mounting options.