Remote Video Monitoring
You can use pimentaCHAT to remotely monitor one or more (10s, 100s, or even 1000s) geographically dispersed locations.
Applications:
- home monitoring while on vacations (from cell phone or Internet Cafe)
- baby monitoring
- building surveillance
- assembly line quality assurance
- industrial control monitoring
- global/regional crisis/emergency center or medical monitoring
- … many more
What you need
The monitoring PC does not need to have camera or mic. However, it must be running a recent copy of Chrome or Firefox that supports webrtc.
At each location: a PC, Mac, Android tablet, embedded computer, or Chromebook running pimentaCHAT with a webrtc supported camera.
Scalability
The design is massively scalable. With the current edition of pimentaCHAT, you can already monitor hundreds of locations. The server is not loaded by the sessions.
This application really shows off the telecom lineage of webrtc – pimentaCHAT acts as the ‘switch’ or ‘signaling fabric’ and gets out of the way once a monitoring session starts.
Getting started
You should be relatively familiar with pimentaCHAT’s video chat capabilities before attempting to try this feature.
Install in-band driver
This feature is implemented within the webrtc in-band signaling driver.
The driver is not installed by default. To install the driver, and the feature, you need to first remove the production webrtc driver:
meteor remove pimentachat:webrtc
Then install the in-band driver:
meteor add pimentachat:webrtc-ib
Create location ‘users’
Create a new user for each location being monitored, for example - living room, dining room, baby’s crib, assembly line A, Queen Mary Hospital IC station 1, and so on.
Login as the monitoring user, and create a directed room to each of the locations.
Setting up locations
At each location, on a machine with supported camera, logon as the location user and go to the directed room.
Click on the top right arrow to open the flex window. You will see THREE buttons:
- VIDEO CHAT
- REMOTE
- SETUP
Click on the SETUP button. Your browser will ask for permission to share camera and mic, allow it. This starts live video in the smaller window.
You are all set!
Note: Make sure the machine will not go into power-save or auto shutoff.
Remote Monitoring
From your monitoring PC, logon to pimentaCHAT as the monitoring user. Enter any of the ‘locations’ room and click the REMOTE button to view the location. Like video chat, you can switch between up-and-down, side-by-side, full definition, and full screen HD mode once the monitoring starts.
Early Access
You are working with early access code. The code is working, but it has bugs. You find them, we fix them! If you encounter any bugs, please create an issue.
Integration and customization
Most frequently asked questions are:
I have this great app for pimentaCHAT remote monitoring, can I create a monitoring front-end that does not look like a ‘Chat’?
Can I monitor multiple locations at the same time, and select any one for zoomed-in detailed inspection?
The answer to both questions is YES. Contact any member of the pimentaCHAT team, or specialists in our community if you need professional help.
