As we’ve now got a cat hole in the garage wall to allow free entry to Mephistopheles and Celobra – giving them a bolthole in advance of builders coming in to do the kitchen – we decided to set up a CatCam so we could monitor them when they go in and out. So I bought one of these:
Unfortunately the stream from this is only visible using the Tapo app on iPhone. What I really wanted was for Sam to be able to view a live stream of it on the internet from Canterbury.
Investigations led to iSpy – a freely available web-based agent that, in theory, should be able to take a direct stream from the IP address of the camera.
It took an age to get this set up correctly. But I managed it. There are a thousand different protocols. In the end I picked an IP camera fed in an IP address with username and password and it seemed to work.
Then I got ambitious and decided to add the security camera we have on the house. Different make, differnt model, different protocol. But this was surprisingly easier.
Then, the big challenge: How to get both of these viewable on the internet at large? Opened up port forwarding, grabbed the IP address of our home network, and….
which doesn’t seem to work for people outside the home network. So this…