bunny webcam

I got this webcam for looking at pet rabbits for my girlfriend's birthday. (webcams, dear children, are something still fascinating for people born before, say, 1985)

The set up was pretty straightforward. I plugged it into the local ethernet and it appeared at 192.168.1.239. The local ethernet uses 192.168.1.0/24 but I think maybe have been just chance that it configured itself that way - it wasn't using DHCP out of the box. When I switched on DHCP it reconfigured itself to a DHCP-allocated address in the same range.

The supplied manual (on paper) describes downloading and installing some setup.exe to configure, but I ignored that, and using nmap discovered it was running an http server on port 81. Logging into this as admin, with no password, I found myself able to view and control the camera without need for any software.

I couldn't get the wifi working, but only spent 10 mins or so on that - we decided it would be best placed right by a wired ethernet port, so there was no need for that.

We attached it to the underside of an Ikea table using electrical tape. There was a balance to strike between being low enough to get a good angle, but high enough that they can't eat the camera or the wires. I would have loved to have put it in the cage with them, but the lifetime of the wires would have been measured in minutes, or possibly seconds.

The camera has motors to pan and tilt, though where its installed that isn't really necessary, and the whirring of the servos seems to scare the white rabbit a bit. That one likes to sit looking at the camera on the other side of the fence, hanging off the underside of the table.

There's a night vision mode too. The camera is surrounded by a ring of infrared LEDs - actually also a bit visible red too. These are turned on by a CdS cell above the camera lens (so you can trigger them with your finger rather than needing to put the camera in the dark).

The user interface is clunky but functional. The main page looks like this, with arrows at the top left to drive the servos. There are admin menus too, which appear even if you aren't authorised - they just don't work for non-authorised users. This clunky interface means its not a good camera for streaming to the public at large.

So, for £40, was this worth it? yes

(btw, not all the pictures in this post were made with the webcam - for example, the pictures of the webcam were taken with an iPhone rather than a complicated mirroring optical arrangement)