Animal Cage Camera

The Animal Cage Camera (ACC) operates with our Videoarchiver to provide video that is synchronous with telemetry data to within ±100 ms. We know of no other camera capable of sustaining such close synchronization continuously for months at a time. The ACC's wide-angle lense can view an entire animal cage when pressed up against the cage wall. The camera is easy to deploy because it requires only one network cable for power and communcation: it runs entirely off industry-standard Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) device. The ACC provides white and infra-read illumination, and the Videoarchiver's Scheduler component allows us to brighten and dim the white and infra-read lights independently on a twenty-four hours cycle of our own choosing. The ACC is roughly $1000, compared to commercial PoE webscams that can be bought for as little as $100. But commercial webcams provide synchronization of no better than ±60 s per day, are equipped with lenses far inferior to that of the ACC, and produce video that is either excessively large or degraded by inferior compression.