Problem scenario
You have a camera (e.g., a TCP/IP ADT security camera) attached to your a router on the network with your laptop. You know the camera's MAC address by looking at the back of the camera itself (or you know its IP address on your network which is even more helpful). How do you use this camera over the network?
Solution
1. If you know the IP address of the camera skip to step #3. Otherwise, find the MAC address. It is usually on the back of the physical camera or possibly with the paperwork that came with the camera.
Mentally change the MAC address to this format: b8-e2-38-a7-1d-21
There must by hyphens in-between every two characters. There must be no colons.
2. Open a PowerShell window. Run this command, but substitute b8-e2-38-a7-1d-21 with the MAC
arp -a | select-string "b8-e2-38-a7-1d-21" |% { $_.ToString().Trim().Split(" ")[0] }
This should give you the IP address.
3. You can construct useful URLs like this as a test: http://x.x.x.x/img/snapshot.cgi?size=3
(Where x.x.x.x is the IP address of the camera.)
4. If you want to administer the camera (and do more than capture still photos with it), open a web browser and go to the IP address.
If you know the camera's username and password, skip this step. Try "administrator" with no password if you do not know. If that doesn't work, make sure that the camera is not connected to a network with the internet. Hold the reset button for 10 seconds. When the device is ready again, try credentials for "administrator" with a blank password.
Resetting the device when it is attached to the internet seems to allow the device to get its password reset from ADT's network on the internet. This is true even if you have no active subscription with ADT.
5. Now you can log in and administer the device. Just open a web browser and go to http://x.x.x.x where x.x.x.x is its IP address. Click on "Administration."
6. You are now done. The next two steps allow you to automate the uploading of images captured by the camera to Amazon's S3. The next two steps require s3cmd to be installed and for you to have an AWS account. Create a Python program like this. (This is Python 2. You may want to re-rewrite it in Python 3 now that it is 2019.)
# s3backupb.py has the following lines (but replace 192.168.1.6 with the IP address of the camera)
import time
from time import gmtime, strftime
from subprocess import check_output
part1 = "curl http://192.168.1.6/img/snapshot.cgi?size=3 > /media/pi/Lexar/pres3/"
filename = strftime("%a:%d:%b:%Y:%H:%M:%S", gmtime()) + '.jpg'
command = part1 + filename
dwldpic = check_output(command, shell=True).split()
precom = "s3cmd -c /home/pi/.s3cfg put /media/pi/Lexar/pres3/"
midpart = " s3://foobarbucket/"
comm2 = precom + filename + midpart + filename
print "wait for 12 seconds"
time.sleep(12) # pause for 12 seconds
print "continue"
s3upload = check_output(comm2, shell=True).split()7. Modify the crontab to have a stanza to run the Python program every minute. The results of crontab -l should look like this:
* * * * * /usr/bin/python /home/pi/test/s3backupb.py