Chap. 1: Scouting of the Main Location

For this first week of the project was mainly sitting down and discussing some details with my parents and going around and scouting out locations seeing where possibly WiFi extenders or hotspots can go and where cameras will be placed at. The discussions took some time in order to finalize some parts of the plan and see if there were any changes. I will have weekly "meetings" with my parents to update them on progress and financial stuff. My stepfather wants me to focus on our main property first, before going on to the second one.

Here is our main property from Google Earth:

The two houses at the bottom left-hand corner have WiFi. He wants to try and expand the coverage to the whole plot of land. And going by the size of the property, the coverage is going to have to expand by quite a lot. I've begun looking into the best way to go forward. Any research or findings on what will be done will be reported, hopefully, in the next post.

Now, the cameras are going to be a little tricky due to them being hardwired when setting up, mostly being due to location. But, I am down for a challenge.

This is the main area where sheep are loaded/unloaded from the trucks and where some cameras will be going:

Outside View -

The farm office is the small room in the back of the covered section.

 Interior View -

There are multiple alleys and lots for sheep to go.

The other place that will have cameras is our new, massive lot barn used for housing sheep.

 Exterior View -

Interior Views (with some sheep for a neat visual) - 

My stepfather hasn't decided yet on what exactly he wants to do here. There are plenty of vantage points to choose from. But, I should know in a blog post or two what we will be doing camera-wise.

Next time, I will be diving in fully and look for the best way to extend the WiFi coverage and seeing if keeping DataTruck as our provider is the best route or if it's time to move on and see what else is out there...

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post!

Prologue and Overview...

This is really for if you need a refresher on what this blog is about or happen to stumble upon this site by accident.

Hello, I am a student at Dakota State Univerity in Madison, SD. Because of Covid-19, it has been difficult to find any sort of internship. So instead I am doing a project course in order to fulfill the necessary credit. I decided to help my family with a little internet project that they have been wanting to do for a while now.

Project description:

​

My parents are the owners/operators of a large sheep farming business and they want to make a few upgrades to the Wi-Fi and its coverage of the property. Currently, we have Wi-Fi in the houses and in a small office in the middle of the farm, nowhere else. We are installing iPads and other tools that require Wi-Fi in various tractors and equipment. They wish to set up hotspots in order to have Wi-Fi coverage of the entire property. My Stepfather also wants to install some HD cameras. These cameras would be installed in a barn and in the area where sheep are loaded/unloaded from the trailer. If possible, he wants these cameras to be hardwired into a main monitoring system and be viewable from our home computer or an app on the phone. These cameras also need to have recording capabilities. The exact number of cameras and hotspots that would be set-up is unknown at this time but will be determined with location scouting.

    

We also have a property about a 1/4-mile drive from the main farm that he wants cameras stationed at as well. These cameras can be wireless. This place would need Wi-Fi installed on the property for the cameras to connect and be monitored. Currently, Data Truck is our internet provider. If need be, my parents are willing to change providers if one better suits their needs. If that option comes into play, I will need to find a new provider that they could get behind. My stepfather wants to keep all the footage specifically of the loading/unloading area when it is in use. The sheep process is time-consuming and, on a busy day, there are multiple pick-ups and drop-offs. If he wants hours of HD footage, he will need more storage. He wants to either upgrade the physical storage of the computer that this footage would go to or find a cloud storage system, depending on what is more reliable and has a better price. This project through my parents, so things could be added or subtracted, and different parts of this project are subject to change. Everything done through my parents. This should be interesting.

Hope you follow along and maybe learn something along the way.

Thanks for reading!