Suggestions for capturing license plate info?

[Jeffrey Creem]

hewitt_tech wrote:

> Unfortunately my car and my daughter and her husband's car have been 
> vandalized by low life's who are shooting out windows with some kind of
> pellet gun. They struck last night shortly after midnight shooting out 
> 3 windows. My car had it's rear driver side window shot out and my 
> daughter's Toyota (fairly new) had the back window and driver's window 
> shot out. The previous weekend my son-in-law had his rear window shot
> out.
>

Sorry to hear about it.

> I believe this vandalism is random because the night my son-in-law 
> reported his window blown out the Manchester police said that there 
> were reports of twenty other vehicles damaged in the surrounding area. 
> Last night there weren't that many cars parked on the street but they 
> only damaged our cars. I couldn't sleep last night so I setup a 
> Linksys web cam that I have but I found almost immediately that the 
> camera is not effective in low light situations. Worse, no streetside 
> window in my house would give any kind of picture that could possibly 
> show a license
> plate. The images that I could get were pretty poor and when the camera
> triggered due to motion, the passing vehicles were mostly a blur. I 
> did find out that if you wanted to even see anything of a passing car you
> needed to set the motion detected video segment to 5 seconds (the range
> allowed with the LinkSys software is 2 thru 5 seconds).  I do have a 
> 2.4 ghz wireless black and white pin hole type camera that can be 
> operated off a 9 volt battery. Since the people who are doing this 
> damage are always driving West to East on our street in order to get a 
> better shot at the cars, I was thinking about setting up the tiny 
> wireless camera on the front dash of my Honda pointing in the 
> direction of travel in hopes that I might pick up the rear plates of 
> passing cars.
>
> Another low tech approach I am considering is to wait up next Friday 
> and Saturday night and simply wait a few doors down from my house with 
> a very powerful light and a cheap disposable flash camera in hopes of 
> catching the car's license plate should they decide to return. Of 
> course if this is just random harassment, maybe I should just forget 
> the whole thing. The police don't seem to be very effective as this 
> vandalism has been going on in Manchester all over the city for some 
> time.
>
> A friend suggested picking up a night vision scope in hopes of 
> capturing the license number.
>
> Does anyone have any other suggestions?
>
> -Alex
>

We had some fires in our neighboorhood last year (around this time). 
After the first one my wife asked me to setup some cameras. I've had 
about 7 going since then. There were more fires as I was adding cameras 
(could get them up fast enough!). I got some info on them but never 
enough to lead to a conviction.

If you are interested in going overboard (and at least having some geek 
level fun while getting at feeling that you are actually doing 
something) you could setup a box with www.zoneminder.com SW on it. I've 
got two Centos 4.x boxes running this with cameras that have built in 
night illumination capability.

You can pick up some 4 chip video capture cards off ebay relatively cheaply.

You want cameras with 1/3" CCDs to keep the noise down. You can get them 
with built in IR LED floodlights. The quality of the night vision can 
actually not all that bad. The tough part is finding good cameras. I'd 
point you to the ones I got last year but like all technology, things 
have moved on and I dont know if you can still find them.

The big problem with any of these security camera approaches is that it 
is very difficult to get something with the resolution to see a license 
plate. Especially at night.

If you do try one of your existing cameras, try driving your own car by 
at night at see how well it works.