Baby monitor with netbook and smartphone [closed]

We're shopping for a baby monitor, but it seems like a waste to pay $150 for something when we already have both cameras/microphones (netbook with built-in webcam is the most mobile one) and remote devices that we carry around (Android phones). They also seem to vary a lot in quality and there are many complaints in forums about whichever product I research.

Looking through the Android market, there are several apps to turn your phone into a baby monitor that will call a specified number if the baby wakes up, but it means leaving your phone in the baby's room, needing another phone to carry with you.

I suppose setting up a streaming feed from a webcam and viewing it on your phone would not be too hard, but I'm afraid running a continuous feed would eat up all of my phone batteries. Maybe something that pushes a notification (SMS, WhatsApp, ?) to my phone telling me to check the feed?

Any ideas? Are there existing solutions?

The netbook is running Linux, and our phones are Android.

Solution 1:

cWatchTheHamster

The cWatchTheHamster

..software project presents a very efficient client-/server backend to stream images from any webcam connected to a linux pc to nearly every kind of client. The server-backend uses v4l4j, client- and server-backend are completely written in java. There is a swing frontend using the client (like hosted in this project) and a beautiful android client (+widget) available in the android market.