Remote Camera Operations System

## Inspiration Remote properties — farms, construction sites, rural facilities — need security coverage in locations where running conduit or trenching cable isn't practical or affordable. We wanted to prove that professional-grade surveillance could be deployed anywhere with line of sight, no electrician, and no monthly infrastructure cost.

## What it does The Remote Camera Operations System is a solar-powered, off-grid UniFi camera node that runs on battery and a single solar panel. A web-based calculator lets installers size the system correctly before purchasing — inputting the AP model, camera count, sun hours, and distance to the parent network — and outputs battery requirements, panel wattage, a wireless link budget, and a full itemized bill of materials with vendor links.

## How we built it We built the calculator as a fully static Next.js app with TypeScript and Tailwind, deployed to Vercel with zero backend. All power and RF math runs in the browser — free-space path loss for the wireless link budget, a three-constraint solar minimum model, and injector efficiency loss for accurate battery sizing. The hardware stack is Ubiquiti UniFi (UK-Ultra AP, USW Flex, G6 cameras), a Victron MPPT charge controller, and LiFePO4 batteries.

## Challenges we ran into Getting the solar math right took iteration — a naive calculation ignores the 12V-to-48V boost conversion loss in the PoE injector, which inflates battery draw by ~15% and means a panel that looks sufficient on paper actually drains the battery slowly over time. We also had to model the wireless uplink as the limiting direction (not downlink) and surface that clearly in the UI so installers don't overestimate link quality.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of The link budget calculator produces results that match manual RF calculations from Ubiquiti's own datasheets, and the solar sizing model correctly catches the "200W panel isn't enough for 2 cameras" case that simpler tools miss. The whole tool is shareable via URL with no login, no backend, and no cost to run.

## What we learned Real-world solar sizing has more constraints than most guides cover — you can't just divide daily consumption by sun hours. The panel has to sustain the daily load and recharge the battery within a reasonable cloudy-day window, and there's a practical floor below which a panel is too small regardless of the math. We also learned that the uplink direction in a mesh link is almost always the bottleneck, and that a $30 RP-SMA directional antenna can recover 4+ dB of margin at typical installation distances.

## What's next for Remote Camera Operations System Shareable configuration URLs so a quote can be sent directly to a customer, a site survey checklist integrated into the tool, support for additional Ubiquiti camera models and multi-node topology planning, and potentially a mobile-friendly view optimized for use on a job site during a walkthrough.