Have been a long time user of Surveillance Station. But it wasn't until recently that I started using it in a scenario where the cam would only be enabled when no one is in the house. Then I had this idea - if the cam can be programmed to play an alarm sound or a warning announcement when it detects motion then it would help scare the trespasser away.
So I did some research on how this cam I am using responds to its web-browser interface that contains the 'play audio' button. By using a combination of the browser's own javascript inspector (nothing fancy, just firefox's very own page inspector) and winpcap + windump (to validate my findings... not absolutely necessary actually), I was able to extract and put together these curl commands to instruct the cam to play audio:
curl -X GET --digest "http://<user>:<password>@<ip address of cam>/camera-cgi/admin/param.cgi?action=MusicCtrl&CountDown=1" -m 30 -v -d "" <-- this is to set playback time limit before playback automatically stops... in this case 1 minute
curl -X GET --digest "http://<user>:<password>@<ip address of cam>/camera-cgi/admin/param.cgi?action=MusicCtrl&MusicPlay=1" -m 30 -v -d "" <-- this is to start playing
(there are also commands to select the audio file etc, but for my purpose these two are the only ones I need)
Now that I can use any curl-enabled command line interface to get the cam to play audio, from this point onwards it was only a matter of setting up my Synology SS to have a new Action Rule, and let motion detection trigger that rule to play the scary "We have alerted local police" warning on top of recording the video whenever it detects motion.
May not be enough to stop all crime, but I had fun doing it anyway.
So I did some research on how this cam I am using responds to its web-browser interface that contains the 'play audio' button. By using a combination of the browser's own javascript inspector (nothing fancy, just firefox's very own page inspector) and winpcap + windump (to validate my findings... not absolutely necessary actually), I was able to extract and put together these curl commands to instruct the cam to play audio:
curl -X GET --digest "http://<user>:<password>@<ip address of cam>/camera-cgi/admin/param.cgi?action=MusicCtrl&CountDown=1" -m 30 -v -d "" <-- this is to set playback time limit before playback automatically stops... in this case 1 minute
curl -X GET --digest "http://<user>:<password>@<ip address of cam>/camera-cgi/admin/param.cgi?action=MusicCtrl&MusicPlay=1" -m 30 -v -d "" <-- this is to start playing
(there are also commands to select the audio file etc, but for my purpose these two are the only ones I need)
Now that I can use any curl-enabled command line interface to get the cam to play audio, from this point onwards it was only a matter of setting up my Synology SS to have a new Action Rule, and let motion detection trigger that rule to play the scary "We have alerted local police" warning on top of recording the video whenever it detects motion.
May not be enough to stop all crime, but I had fun doing it anyway.