CCTV Camera

Overview

This is an outdoor pan-tilt-zoom IP dome camera, the workhorse of perimeter and street surveillance. Behind a clear bubble in the Dome Housing sits a Camera Module that pairs a high-resolution CMOS sensor with a long-range motorized varifocal lens, so an operator can frame a wide scene or push in on a single face a hundred metres away. The whole optical head rides on the Pan-Tilt Mechanism, which spins continuously through 360 degrees and tilts from the horizon to straight down, letting one camera cover the ground that would otherwise need several fixed units.

Power and video travel over a single cable. The Network Port takes Power-over-Ethernet from the switch, runs the camera, and carries the compressed stream back out, so installation is one run of Cat-6 instead of separate power and coax. After dark the IR Illuminator floods the scene with invisible infrared light and the sensor switches to monochrome night mode. Recording can land on a network video recorder or stay local on the microSD Slot card, and a built-in Microphone adds audio. Because it lives outdoors, the housing is sealed to IP66 and a Climate Module module keeps the optics clear in freezing weather.

How it works

Light enters through the bubble and the motorized lens, passes the IR-cut filter, and lands on the CMOS sensor inside the Camera Module. The sensor's digital pixel stream feeds the Mainboard, where a video SoC and a hardware H.265 encoder compress it into a low-bitrate stream that the Ethernet PHY hands to the network port. The same board's MCU drives the stepper motors: the Pan-Tilt Mechanism aims the head while a slip ring passes power and signal across the spinning pan joint, and the Zoom & Focus Drive motors set zoom and focus so the image stays sharp as the lens moves.

A light sensor on the illuminator board watches ambient brightness; when it falls below threshold the board swings the IR-cut filter out of the optical path and switches on the infrared LEDs, and the sensor reads the reflected IR as a grayscale image. The Network Port negotiates PoE+ with the switch to pull the roughly 25 watts the motors, heater, and illuminator need at full draw. In cold conditions the heater in the Climate Module module warms the bubble to stop condensation and frost while the blower evens out the air inside the sealed dome. Footage is encoded continuously and either streamed to a recorder over ONVIF or looped onto the microSD card so recent clips survive a network outage.