SmartSentry is an intelligent time-lapse capture utility. It is designed to monitor a scene in unattended mode for extended periods of time and capture any movement or activity. This technique can result in very high effective compression rates, for example: a relatively static scene can be monitored at 4 frames per second for well over 10-hours to produce an output AVI smaller than 20 Megabytes.
Output can be viewed using the standard Windows Media Player or Active Movie Player. Each recorded frame has a corresponding time-stamped entry in the log file to assist when reviewing the AVI produced.
Typical uses include: intruder-detection; bird-watching and door-sentry applications. Due to the additional frame processing overhead, it is currently not best suited to high speed movie capture.
This is shareware software. It's a spin-off from a related project, please feel free to distribute it as you see fit (please include this help file). There is no charge for this version, no time limit, and no special requirements for uninstalling. If you don't find it useful simply delete it. If you do find it useful and would like to pay us a small token of thanks, pledge our rally team a couple of dollars mailto:rs2000@rapidautomation.co.uk (we need all the support and sponsorship we can get) and we'll keep you posted as the new features are developed.
Legal notice: There are no claims or guarantees of any kind whatsoever made or implied by Rapid Automation relating to the use of this shareware product.
Rapid Automation are a small Design and Consultancy company based in the Midlands UK, specialists in C++, Windows, and PC Hardware development projects.
Please send your comments or suggestions - mailto:comments@rapidautomation.co.uk
Selecting the target folder determines where the image and log file is stored
Allows pre-allocation of the AVI file to help improve performance. Important only if capturing is expected to be continuous and relatively high volume, not so much of an issue for capturing changes in relatively static scenes for example intruder detection.
Closes the application immediately.
Starts or ends triggering and capturing.
(Undergoing final tests - 0.20) Produces a histogram representing the colour or intensity profile of the image.
Displays the status bar within the frame window,
Highlights movement when not capturing
Forces overlay (if your hardware supports it) - disabled while capturing.
Used to select the most suitable Video CODEC on your system
Used to select the required video mode and colour depth for your capture operation
Used to select the required video source, video mode, brightness, contrast, and colour levels supported by your hardware
(Under Development 0.30) Used to select the required email settings
(Undergoing final tests - 0.20) Used to setup a trigger zone with the scene
Starts Capturing.
Ends Capturing.
While Capturing - Beeps if three consecutive frames are captured.
Displays the number of frames sampled since the start.
Displays the number of frames captured since the start.
Sets the delta level between the same pixel on successive frames.
Indicates the number of pixels that matched the trigger condition. Note: The level indicator is scaled to the same ratio as the slider bar below.
When this threshold (set by the Slider) matches the number of pixels hit, a single frame is captured and appended to the AVI file.
Sets the sample interval in milliseconds.
Sets the limit to the number of frames to be captured, once this value is reached capturing automatically ends.
Allows the playback to be viewed at 8 x the sample rate, enabling fast preview of long monitoring periods.
Applies the settings enclosed within the group box.
(Under Development 0.30) Used to mail details to monitoring centre
Movement activity matching the pixel trigger setting is highlighted.
Movement activity matching the pixel trigger setting and the #Pixels Hit condition results in a frame being captured and appended to the AVI file.
Two separate files are produced: SCVyymmddhhmm.avi and SCVyymmddhhmm.log where yy represents the year, mm represents the month, dd represents the day of the month, hh is the hour of day in 24-hr format, an mm is the minute that the capturing was initiated.By default, SmartSentry will attempt to store these files in the folder selected by the file.target folder. If this has not been set, it will attempt to store to folder C:\Avi - if this does not exist it will store to the current directory.