If you still held onto your old iPhone, or iPod, here’s an excellent and free idea of what to do with it.
There are a lot of low-cost security cameras on the market, but if you do happen to have an old iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad around, you can turn it into a security camera for free using a sophisticated app called Manything, which is a great piece of software for iOS.
There are a myriad of different reasons why you might want to do this. The obvious one is to be able to survey your home security, and know what’s going on outside.
What is Manything?
Manything is a free iOS app – yes free – which basically allows you to convert your old iPhone (or iPad or iPod Touch) into a home surveillance camera.
All you have to do is follow these easy steps and you’ll be ready to go!
- Download Manything here
- Create an account for yourself with a username and password – either using Facebook or via email.
- Choose from two options; ‘View My Cameras’ or ‘Record Using This Device’
- If you have two devices, either an iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad, you can use one to act as the security/surveillance camera, and you can monitor the activity it records on the other device.
- You can also use the Manything web app to view what you’ve recorded.
The most important thing to do is make sure you download the app first and register, it won’t be possible to do anything else until you’ve done that). Don’t try to register on the website as it’s only possible via the App.
When you start recording, it will stream live to your Manything account, which you can watch at any time. Manything is movement activated, so when you’re When there is movement in front of the camera, it will pick it up and send full frame video for you to watch. When no movement is there, it drops down to only 3 frames per second to reduce data and bandwidth usage.
You can also download the software to your main phone or new device. If you then choose ‘View My Cameras’ you’ll be able to watch what’s going on on the live stream from your new device.
This software is pretty awesome, especially for a free app. You can utilize motion tracking software, and you will get a notification when something is recorded. You can set it up to work just like an IP camera. All saved clips will be stored freely on the Cloud.
It also has an IFTTT channel meaning you can do so much more with it if you also have Belkin and WeMo and other compatible device products to really boost your home security.
Here’s a Video “How To” Guide from Manything:
Some Ideas for Using Manything
1. DIY Home Security
In case you need to feel safer at home, install this to record overnight in your home. It will pick up any movement that happens during the night, so you can be safe in the knowledge that you will know what happened if you need to.
2. Film Making
A creative way to use Manything would be to use it to film a movie, with security camera footage…a nice easy and effective way to get the effect. If you are shooting a movie, you might like to check out some of our favourite film making apps in this article.
3. Car Monitoring
You could turn it into a dashboard camera on your car to record accidents. Be secure in the knowledge that if you were in an accident you may have some video evidence to back up what happened. You may even want to keep it set up in your car at night. Due to its movement activation, you don’t have to watch back through hours of nothing. It only records the eventful moments.
4. In your Workplace or Lock up
Maybe you have some valuables in work or at a lock up and you want to make sure nobody nabs them – with this cloud backed up software, you’ll know “who done it” as they say!
5. Recording wildlife on a webcam
If you can’t get close enough on your own, you might well be able to hide your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch closer to what you’re trying to film. You could hide it in your bird feeder, or in a tree, or a burrow.
Finding out what your pets get up to while you’re out – I for one would certainly love to find out what my pets get up to when I’m not around! If you do use it for this, please post some of your videos on our Facebook Page
Happy Manythinging!