Congratulations on your purchase of the Watcher XL PLUS Security System!

Included with your system should be a sheet including information to access this website, along with your system password. If you lose or forget this password, please contact us here.

From our workshop, we do a large portion of the initial setup, including:

• Set the system on DHCP (Automatic IP Address)
  
• Setup of NTP (Time) Server for automatic time and Time Zone
  
• Formatting and setup of all recording Hard Drives
  
• Setup licensing for cameras & features
  
• Automatic Power-On when power is connected (example: system turns on automatically after a power outage)
  

**Note: some networks do not allow for DHCP, in this case, please contact your IT or Point of Sale technician to help assign network information to the system. We can help with this process, but it is always advised for someone with knowledge of the network to do this setup.

Here is an example of how your network will look when the install is completed

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Setup

1. Connect your power cable, display cable(s), mouse, and keyboard
   
2. On the rear of the system, there are two network ports. Port labeled ‘1’ or ‘Net’ is for your Internet cable, and Port labeled ‘2’ or ‘Cams’ is for a cable that runs into a camera POE switch
   
3. Turn on the power switch in the back. If the system does not power on, use the toggle power button in the front (behind the caged door)
   
4. Click the padlock icon on the bottom row of icons to login
   
5. Click the System Settings icon near the bottom left
   

6. Open Network Settings, here you can set your network information ‘statically’. To do this, uncheck the DHCP checkbox and manually enter the information. Click the drop-down in the Network Adapter field and select Network Adapter 2. Make sure that this IP is set to 192.168.4.250 and the Subnet Mask set to 255.255.255.0. When done, click Apply & Save.
   

7. You may now exit and return back to the main viewing screen
   

Now that the main setup is done, you can start to add cameras. Please check out our guide at the Adding a New Camera page. We strongly recommend to test and add cameras to the system before running cable and installing cameras. You can do this with 2 short CAT5e cables, a POE switch, and your cameras, right at the system. Simply run a cable from the Network Port 2 into the Up-link port on your switch, and connect a camera to a regular POE port.

Using our guide above, modify all new cameras to ‘uniform’ IP Addresses, and add them to the system. This process will take some time, but later when you are installing cameras, they will automatically connect with a good CAT5e cable connection.

Installation Tips and Tricks

Cabling

We recommend crimping CAT5e cable with the 568B method.

Credit: https://incentre.net

Incorrectly crimping CAT5e cables can cause cameras to not power on, cameras to connect/disconnect, slow ping times, poor video feed, and in some cases, can damage the camera.

Networking / POE Switches

Our POE Switches have two types of ports, regular, and up-links. Regular ports are for cameras, and run at lower speeds (100mb/s), and up-link ports are faster (1000mb/s), and are meant to connect to either the DVR system, or other switches. Connecting a switch or DVR to a camera port may result in camera stuttering, artifacts, and ghosting.

Note how the ports are separated by space on the right side of each switch

You can generally tell which ports are up-links as they will be separated away from the regular ports. On most switches these will be labeled in the light-up diagram on the left as well. In the example, the top 8 port switch has ports 9 and 10 segmented to the right side, and the bottom 24 port switch has ports 25 and 26 segmented to the right side as well.

Future Proofing your install

I recommend making a diagram of your switches, and which cameras connect to each port. This will help you immensely if you need to troubleshoot cameras in the future. It is also a good idea to take a picture of each camera, then later label each picture with the camera name in the DVR software (example: Point of Sale 1, Switch A). You can then put these on a flash drive and make a backup on the DVR or your own PC. This will make it easy for you or a technician to locate cameras within the store.

Example: Switch Documentation