My neighborhood has seen a rash of car part thefts. Upstairs neighbor got the catalytic converter stolen off her Prius -- price tag: $2k. My wife got hers stolen about a year ago and it cost her $500. My battery was stolen about 2 years ago and I used the OG tech of a lock & chain to keep the hood from opening when popped. Someone has nevertheless popped the hood twice in the past 3 weeks before encountering the magic chain.

Can anyone suggest an affordable dashcam or vehicle surveillance product? Ideally this product would monitor my car's surroundings and it would be easy to scan/scrub the footage or to go to a particular time very easily.

I'm also wondering about something for my house too. Bonus points for remote accessibility, audio link, offsite video storage, etc.

Affordability is very important. Any suggestions welcome.

Repurposing Old Smartphones for Home Automation may interest you.

You probably want an outdoor/night vision wireless IP camera with pan/tilt. Many have motion detection and can send email alerts. Some will take a series of pictures upon detection for a fixed period of time and send them via FTP.

I can not suggest a particular model or manufacture.

This looks pretty interesting. I think we might have an old iPhone around here, but not any Firefox phones.

Sadly, building cameras are probably not helpful for monitoring the car. It's street parking only here and there's no guarantee my car will be visible from my building.

For the home cameras, these seem like important features:
* capable of wifi connection to password-secured network
* captures audio, ideally with two-way audio
* each camera accessible remotely using secure interface. I.e., with proper authentication I could view each camera feed from a remote location
* video footage ideally stored off-site in case the thieves still the cameras.

Taking still images is one thing, video would be preferable I think, but nothing too bandwidth-heavy.

And old Iphone would be cheapest but as far as I know they do not have a night or low level camera so unless you have the car parked right under a street lamp it is not going to work in the dark.

My experience with dash and helmet cams goes back a bit before the Go Pro. Typically they are standalone devices that record in two modes i.e continuous overwriting old data and stop when the memory card/disk is full. I think one system did have motion detection but never tried using it. For those cameras that are battery powered you might need an external battery or be able to plug it into the car itself.

Camera angle, field of view etc are other factors. At night if the perpetrator does not accidentally look right into the camera it probably will not be good enough to use unless the police can match some standout features.

Supercircuits is a good retail hardware source for home use. Make sure you get cameras that will work adequately at night. I once actually spec'd out a home surveillance system with their equipment, but never got around to installing it, as life is change.

You might also take a look at the motion software package.