Using an iPhone and a Mac Mini as a baby monitor
Having recently misplaced the proper baby call, we needed a new way of checking if the baby is really sleeping. At first we used an iPhone app called BabyMonitor – and ran it on an iPad1 while listening on one of our iPhones. The system is very reliant on Wifi and can be quite unstable. And event on your phone will trigger a drop in the application and you then need to pair them up again before it works properly.
The solution was not elegant enough. I then started experimenting with different setups. On the Mac Mini I hooked up an external web cam and made the audio input come from the web cam – on a usb-extention cord to the baby’s room. I then tried 3 things. First I did a Quicktime Stream server and used the QuickTime Broadcaster application on the Mac Mini to create a stream. This approach – though it would scale well didn’t really match up well on the iPhone or the iPad as a client – without writing a html-page and embedding the stream in that page. Scrapped that plan. Then I went for FaceTime. Using FaceTime I had video and sound directly between either an iPad or the iPhones. Excellent. One drawback was that the video-part of it made the iPhone very hot – and it drained battery very fast. An added problem was the same as on the BabyMonitor-app – it needs wifi to work – any drop in connectivity means that you need to place a new call and answer that call in the other end. Scrap that.
The last and final solution – so far – is to run Skype on the Mac Mini – create a special account that auto answers people you have in your contact list. You then use the Skype-app on the iPhone to call in to the baby-monitor-account. This was you instantly get audio when dialing in – you can even go video – but that is not needed. The system works quite well – it’s even available on the 3G network – so the wifi-connectivity-issues aren’t important. Having an unlimited data-plan – I have no scruples doing it entirely over 3G on the iPhone-side – and the quality of the audio is not bad at all.
So if you already own a machine – any kind – be it linux, pc, mac or whatever – and already own an external webcam – already own the usb-extention cable and a smartphone or tablet capable of running skype – this solution is free. Skype doesn’t cost a dime – and the only thing you need to worry about is paying for the data – unless you go unlimited. You can even do an iPad->iPhone, iPad->iPad, iPhone->iPhone, Android->iPhone,Galaxy->iPad. The sky is the limit in terms of platforms – but a real cheap old linux-box would suffice.
