I've done a few things since this thread started.
Our neighbourhood has recently dealt with some nuisances; someone's car was broken into (all the doors and the trunk left open in front of his house!) and someone's bicycle was stolen from their garage. The Mrs. isn't terribly thrilled about this, and while I think it's likely an isolated incident and not something to be too worried about, we've both decided that it would be a good idea to install a Z-wave motion sensing flood light and some IP cameras around the garage.
I originally looked at wireless cameras, but was worried about the wireless reaching the far end of the garage, and really wanted to keep the wiring simple. So, I decided to do PoE cameras. Problem is that we have a detached garage, and there is no way I am going to yank up my backyard just to run a second conduit to run some data cabling through, nor am I going to run cables overhead.
Ubiquiti to the rescue. I installed a single gang in the garage with three outdoor-grade ethernet cables terminating at a three-port plate, and from that, all three are plugged into the PoE ports of a UniFi Switch 8-60w which will do 802.3af PoE. One cable exits to the front of the garage where the camera can get a good look at the apron and our back gate. The next gets a perfect view of someone entering the yard, and the last ethernet cable exits to the side of the garage facing the house, where it plugs into a Ubiquiti UAP-AC-Mesh, mounted to the exterior garage wall. The AC Mesh is good down to -30 degrees Celsius, and uses the master bedroom AP (located closest to the garage) as a wireless backhaul.
The AC Mesh was immediately found by the controller and I was able to adopt it and set up the wireless uplink to prioritize the master bedroom AP, since the AP in my office is the opposite side of the house. Once that was adopted, the Switch 8-60w appeared and was available for adoption into the controller. Updated their firmware individually, and they're good to go. The cameras I'm looking at support 802.3af PoE so I didn't need to invest in the more expensive Switch 8-150w that does 802.3af/at and 48v passive PoE.
As an added bonus, anyone who is outside in the backyard can connect to the guest WiFi over the AC Mesh and still get really fast connectivity. The wireless backhaul on the wireless AP is currently sitting around -56dBm (84%) for signal strength, and 650 Mbps up/down link speed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NuclearFart
Am I the only one who read every post this thread, but has no idea what the hell y'all are talking about?
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You know when you walk into a building, and there is magically internet all around you?
It's that. It's magic internet.
But really, anything you don't understand, just ask and we'll explain it.