USB Cables and Cameras

This page has summaries of some USB limits [1]. USB 2.0 has the longest cable segment limit of 5M (1.x, 3.x, and USB-C are all shorter), so USB 2.0 is what you want for long runs. The USB limit for daisy chained devices is 7 (including host and device), so that means a maximum of 5 hubs or a total distance between PC and device of 30M. There are lots of other ways of getting longer distances, the cheapest seems to be putting an old PC at the far end of an Ethernet cable.

Some (many? most?) laptops have USB for the interface to the built in camera, and these are sold from scrapped laptops. You could probably setup a home monitoring system in a typical home by having a centrally located PC with USB hubs fanning out to the corners. But old Android phones on a Wifi network seems like an easier option if you can prevent the phones from crashing all the time.

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/c859e9c