Different Uses for CCTV Systems

While most people think of CCTV systems as security camera systems or surveillance systems, there are certainly other uses for a good security camera, monitor and DVR. These are some of the more unusual – and delightful – uses we’ve seen made of CCTV systems, often with wireless access.

Coffee’s Ready!

While not technically a CCTV system, the first recorded use of a remote camera over a network was the Trojan room coffee pot, in the old Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Students working in the lab got tired of making the trip down to the coffee room only to find that there was no coffee in the pot. In 1991, Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky wrote server and client software, connected a CCTV camera to the network and turned on the world’s first webcam, whose sole purpose was to help to help people working in remote parts of the building avoid pointless trips to the coffee room.

Wildlife Camera

Thousands of people around the world get an up close and personal look at deer, squirrels and other wildlife on their property – and more exotic creatures in remote locations – thanks to CCTV systems with high-quality security camera systems mounted in wilderness, woods and other natural areas.  A night vision surveillance camera is ideal for observing and recording the wildlife that visits your garden at night, and allows you to view the natural behavior of animals that would flee if they knew you were watching.

Oven Cam

You may not have a need to watch what’s cooking inside your oven, but a large bakery that produced Danish pastries had exactly that need on a temporary basis. The pastries were fed through the oven on a conveyor belt and discharged onto wire racks to cool down and go to packing. On occasion, the pastries would jam at the transfer point, and within minutes, the bakery would have a full-fledged Danish disaster on its hands. It wasn’t bad enough that they’d lose an entire night’s production of pastries – they’d also lose several days’ production to cleanup. A surveillance camera set up inside the oven soon found the problem – one that required the congruence of several different factors that had a thousands-to-one chance of occurring just right. The bakery repaired the problem, but left the CCTV camera in place just to keep an eye on things.

Got a situation where an extra pair of unseen eyes would  be useful? Consider the benefits and flexibility of CCTV systems to help you solve your problem.