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iPhone as a baby monitor?

rckstwrz

rckstwrz

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 8, 2005
86
5
Birmingham, AL
I've got an old PowerBook in the closet as well as an old firewire iSight. All they're doing is collecting dust. I've also got a baby, who also collects dust, but only by eating it. Anywho, I'm wondering if it's possible to somehow set up my PowerBook and iSight as a video baby monitor, and then broadcast that video locally as a bonjour website so that I could view it on my iPhone. Does software like this exist? Are there any free options?
 
i think a piece of software called remote buddy could do the trick.. from the phone you just need to type in the bonjour url and then u can see whats going on with the camera, i dont however think the sound would work.. hope this helps...
 
it certainly seems to transmit plenty of whining and crying around here. :)
 
eh...sounds like too much work for little pay off. I'd stick with an ordinary baby monitor. It'll save electricity and you won't have to go through all the troubleshooting of setting it up.
 
California King said:
eh...sounds like too much work for little pay off. I'd stick with an ordinary baby monitor. It'll save electricity and you won't have to go through all the troubleshooting of setting it up.
Click to expand...

and buy a piece of technology not made by apple?
the horror
 
California King said:
eh...sounds like too much work for little pay off. I'd stick with an ordinary baby monitor. It'll save electricity and you won't have to go through all the troubleshooting of setting it up.
Click to expand...

Agreed

I congratulate you on being one of the nerdiest parents I've ever heard of, but just invest in a regular baby monitor

Honestly though, back when i was growing up it was called "leaving the baby's door slightly open", none of this fancy walkie talkie business.
 
rckstwrz said:
I've got an old PowerBook in the closet as well as an old firewire iSight. All they're doing is collecting dust. I've also got a baby, who also collects dust, but only by eating it. Anywho, I'm wondering if it's possible to somehow set up my PowerBook and iSight as a video baby monitor, and then broadcast that video locally as a bonjour website so that I could view it on my iPhone. Does software like this exist? Are there any free options?
Click to expand...

could just sell them to me on the cheap and buy a new monitor ;)
 
Baby monitors are rather cheap and I'd rather not use a phone/computer setup to imitate that functionality. Too much could go wrong with the setup, either waking up the little one(s) or losing the connection.
 
I've got a regular baby monitor and it works great, but I have thought about using the iPhone with a webcam when she's older to keep an eye on her in the other room.
 
We have a regular baby monitor in our five-month old's room, but I'm really tempted to try this, just to see if I can.

Translation: I'm an enormous nerd. I pity my poor kid.
 
That would be pretty cool. You could use it if you go out and get a babysitter or something. There's an app called iCam on the App Store which lets you stream video from a Mac with a built in, USB, or FireWire webcam, and it works over the local network. You could probably get it to work over the internet too.
 
My wife and I bought a video baby monitor when our son was born, and it was worth every penny. Sometimes a cry out in the middle of the night was something that wouldn't wake him up; you could see that in the monitor. If you open the door and walk in to check on him (as with a regular baby monitor), it would wake him up.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

I would recommend the application called orb in the app store. You can stream and watch the live feed through the application anywhere you have wifi or a cellular signal.
 
rckstwrz said:
I've got an old PowerBook in the closet as well as an old firewire iSight. All they're doing is collecting dust. I've also got a baby, who also collects dust, but only by eating it. Anywho, I'm wondering if it's possible to somehow set up my PowerBook and iSight as a video baby monitor, and then broadcast that video locally as a bonjour website so that I could view it on my iPhone. Does software like this exist? Are there any free options?
Click to expand...

I think that logmein makes a free version. It will remotely control your
Mac over the Internet.

1. Turn on your Mac & I site. Aim it where you want

2. Remote connect using logmein (assuming it works for MAC) and you are watching whatever the camera is watching
 
I used iCam for a while but then I found a better solution.

I bought Cisco WIFI Camera and now I can monitor anything I want from anywhere I want, as long as I have access to internet. And I do not need to keep a computer on all the time.

The only issue I had with iCam is that I do not know who else is watching my feed.

Y.
 
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