Seems thieves are reconning our neighborhood, so am starting to research this topic and look at possibilities.
If anyone has researched this lately, would appreciate any search keywords, gotchas, ‘works better with Apple products’ advice, learnings from mistakes etc. Would expect to view recordings on Mac/i-/iPad-OS/Linux.
I tend to be on the privacy end of the spectrum so am particularly worried about security of the wifi (planning to connect system to a previous router), how to keep it from reporting to a mother ship or surveilling our home network etc.
Other considerations:
EU resident so I need to mind the local regs; expecting hardware to be similar to US though
do not want to use a cloud; local storage only (if possible on a usb stick in the router)
do not want to use an App that requires invasive privacy settings
would prefer no App at all, just periodically revu the recordings
would like to set the hours of activity
remote access occasionally would be good but only with highest security
prefer one time purchase instead of subscription
do not need to converse with people seen on camera but audio recording would be useful
I suppose notifications when something is seen would be useful but perhaps too much so
rather not have any connection to any AI analysis of what is seen (manufacturer sites not clear if that is done on-device or if sent to humans or robots for analysis)
The few I’ve looked at online make it clear I need to research more, there are so many initialisms and references to features I’ve never heard of, vague promotional statements, and few downloadable user guides to explore setting up procedures, app requirements etc.
At the moment using a couple of ‘wildlife cameras’ on AA batteries and SD cards. They work fairly well with sensing and recording but do tend to eat the batteries and if I set up 5-6 of them it would take a while to collect their cards and review recordings.
I wouldn’t touch a Eufy product. Two years ago, news broke that their security was very lax and they were uploading videos to their servers, while claiming to not be doing so. And they’re a Chinese company.
They claim they’ve fixed all these problems, but I wouldn’t give them a second chance. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Any chance you could use a powered ethernet system? I think Swann still have kits that use ethernet instead of wifi and power the cameras via the ethernet cables so no battery woes. Of course installing cables is not an easy task - hence the attraction of wifi systems.
The Swann kit stores video on a local hard disk and live video/recordings can be accessed via TV/HDMI or an iOS app. If the base station is connected to a home router then live video and recordings can be accessed remotely via the iOS app.
Old technology but it seems to address many of your concerns.
I recently was on a wildlife conservation trip. Many of the research and animal protection groups in the reserves and conservancies I visited used non-networked, battery-powered cameras in their fieldwork. So I’d say your use of similar cameras isn’t a compromise or an improvisation.
Now, if I were trying to record criminals doing bad things outside of my house, I would plan my video setup around the assumption that the criminals would try to disable any cameras they spot. So I would conceal each camera as much as possible and minimize things such as cables, mounts, and other attachments. I also would want to avoid having any single points of failure that are not in a secured place. This means, as you might have guessed at this point, that I would go with standalone wildlife cameras.
If, on the other hand, my objective was to deter criminals, I would use big, boxy, fortified cameras along with motion-activated lights.
If it’s an option, this is what I’d use. We used PoE for a set of eight cameras around the office and only needing a network cable was great. We bought relatively cheap outdoor cameras based on the recommendations of our software,
We used SecuritySpy and it made a very useful system. You do, of course, need an old Mac to run it on, but you can easily use local storage. It runs its own web server so you can log in from a browser, and they also have a very nice phone app which allows you to view cameras remotely. The software has many, many options, but is reasonably easy to set up and we found it very reliable.
Our house is long and skinny, so there’s a long perimeter to observe. I’d prefer hardwired as afaik it’s more ‘secure’ at least to its base station etc. We have a flat roof with a couple of old unused chimney shafts where cables could snake down. I’ve been thinking more of cameras mounted away from the house instead of, for example, on corners of the roof on some kind of poles/outriggers. This would also make is easier to avoid filming neighbor properties, which is the rule here.
I might use a mix of wired and wifi, will see how it goes as I research. We don’t have a tv so viewing on Mac-iPhone-iPad-Linux would be the best.
Personally I’m also old technology so wired would be fine for me.
Another plus of wildlife cameras is easy portability depending on how they perform in any given location. I tried one particularly motion sensitive on inside our house door, looking through a clear glass panel. Although I came and went numerous times and did activity inches in front of it, it didn’t make a single recording in 5-7 days. So some learning is there, as I suppose will also be the case with solar/wifi units.
For those, I could get some inexpensive and minimally disruptive posts and spikes to mount them in the ground in locations I think would work and reposition over time before mounting more securely.
Deterrence would be the goal. We had a police security review visit once and the list of suggestions was long and expensive. It is hard for folks like us to ‘think like dark wizards’, but on the basic logic of making our home appear more risky than neighbors, having visible cameras and more motion lighting might be a good compromise. We could stretch the Topic to infinity batting back and forth such considerations, though.
The recent recons have been fairly bold though, one hoody-clad person with a side pouch actually rang the doorbell at the front door of a neighbor house near midnight several times. At our house a bolted gate appears to have been forced open (not particularly difficult) and a terrace door left open (there is a slight chance I forgot to close the terrace door but unlikely wind would have opened the gate).
Another weak point in all this is the manufacturer apps. Is there any way to be sure they are not saving or leaking data out to the manufacturer or their contractors? I want to protect our home but don’t want video of our property spread around the internet.
When our company was rebuilding our main offices, we used several solar powered trail cameras to monitor the site. Each had a SIM card, and we used FTP to upload files to our FTP server. It worked very well, until they were stolen. They’re self contained, light, portable, easy to install, and easy to steal. We had footage of the thieves in their garage but it didn’t identify them well enough to bother trying to get them back.
You may have a more permanent way to affix them to a building or pole, but if they’re visible they’re a target.
@trilo wow with SIM cards! This is getting complexer and complexer, but interesting ideas!
Theft of cameras themselves can be an issue for sure. Truly determined thieves will defeat anything we set up. If we can deter the others by making our house look more risky than others then that is a step forward.
I had acquired quite a few internet-of-things devices over the years, but became increasingly frustrated and concerned about many ways in which you don’t actually own most IoT equipment. When I moved two years ago, I went all in on Home Assistant, a free, open source platform for managing IoT devices. The server runs locally (I run it on a Raspberry Pi) so no data need ever leave your local network. I’m using Amcrest cameras and Power Over Ethernet (POE) for visual and audio awareness. I also control the usual assortment of lighting options, and have some quite sophisticated interfaces to my solar plant and electric vehicle, but one need not go that far. I’m extremely happy with my Home Assistant (HA) setup, but there are caveats:
not surprisingly, setting the system up is a lot more complicated than it would be if you chose to use your device manufacturer’s proprietary cloud-based app, subscription, and services
not all devices are compatible, though HA does support Zigbee, Matter, and I think a few other standards – I’ve heard there’s some sort of HomeKit bridge, but I know nothing about it
the HA server does not natively support TLS encryption which, for a privacy-focused product, seems a grave oversight; there are solutions, but none that are particularly simple (I’m using an nginx reverse proxy)
I have yet to find a good battery/solar camera that’s HA-compatible, though I haven’t put too much effort into it
At the end of the day, though, for your efforts you get full ownership of your devices and the platform on which they run, you get incredibly interoperability among devices, and it’s possible to achieve real privacy.
Arlo sells a solar mini-panel that plugs into its cameras. It keeps my remote camera fully charged. The Wi-Fi range is about 100 feet. I keep it on my neighbor’s house, pointed at ours; he does the same on our house, pointed at his. I opt to have my clips recorded to a USB drive plugged into the Arlo base station.
Excellent @ron ! I’m dashing off to the airport to pick up family but will definitely check this out. Sounds very close to the kind of thing I’m looking for!
thanks @nextstep I will check out Arlo’s offerings. Saving to a USB drive is good imho. Would need to look into the local rules on this, you’re generally not allowed to have a camera viewing anyone’s property but your own. Maybe neighbors can agree to something like this, I think our nearest one might.
I started twenty years ago with a Blink system, which worked okay and the cameras are pretty good but I am not sure I would buy them now, with a subscription. They do not have a good range because of the need to speak to the separate control module as well as the WLAN, so they only cover areas which these devices can see through the windows (the house is 215 years old with thick stone walls). The Blink cameras need to use pairs of AA lithium batteries, so they have to be reasonably accessible. The weather here in Scotland can be very testing and I found the weather cases you can buy for the cameras do not work well, so I use the cameras as they came but under overhangs where possible. I found that a small hole in the weather case would be too tempting for local spiders, which appreciate the infra red light’s effect on flying bugs. As do the local bats which will keep flying past some cameras to trigger them. Similarly, spiders will build webs around and in front of the cameras for this reason. So a lot of my videos are of bats and spiders.
I tried a Eufy solo camera which did not have a great range. It was pretty hopeless in bad weather. My daughter bought one and hers failed to keep the weather out too. I also had a Euphy doorbell camera which kept failing to speak to the WLAN and I was constantly having to re-set the thing. I gave it away and bought an Aqara doorbell camera, which works fine but the support is terrible and the manual / UI is very poor. It works with Apple Home app which I find helpful for when my wife and I are at the other end of the house watching TV and we have an Amazon delivery at night time.
The most important location for us for a camera is the one by the gate into the property where we have a pole onto which it can be mounted. This is about 15 metres line of sight, through the window, from the router. It proved too much for a Blink or Euphy camera, so I have recently done some research on the Reolink Altas and the Tapo C460. I liked the Reolink because you can use a desktop app to review the videos and the camera can track subjects but their support equivocated about whether it would work independently of a control unit. I settled on the Tapo C460, mainly on cost grounds. It cost me £100 plus the cost of a 128 SD card to carry the recordings. It had a failure after the first week but this was allegedly a glitch with the relationship between the SD card and the camera which was sorted by reformatting the SD card (which can be done remotely, within the camera).
It is till “on trial” but we seem to have settled into a working relationship. The image quality of the C460 is impressive, the light which can be turned on if you want clarity is good but so is the night time infra red camera. It has a solar panel which works well, even where it is located which is close to large trees (it always reports 100% battery). The kit which comes with the solar panel combined does not include a strap fitting for round poles, so you need to work around that if you have only got a round pole, as do I. The cable which connects the solar panel to the camera is not a great weather seal but seems to work okay. So I can get the required amount of daylight to the solar panel, I have mounted the panel and the camera separately. The lead which comes with the kit to connect them is short, so I had to do a bit of tweaking to get them both mounted in the right position and connected. TP-Link supply an extension for the cable which adds about a metre to the length and I may tidy things up using this cable extension later on, dressing the cable with clips but the height that would add to the panel position requires a longer ladder!
One specific benefit for us is that there is an alarm on the C460 which assists with our war with the deer which treat our garden as an all you can eat salad bar. Our other deer alarms are not very effective but the C460 alarm had it running into the woodland, obviously spooked.
From the US. Have used Waze cameras on and off, mainly for trying to decide which critters are destroying my wife’s vegetable garden. We got it out after a year or two, and the newest one (2–3 years old. I think we got it because it had some feature we wanted. still functioning. Two older (5+? and maybe their first model) seemed not to want to connect. But they cost only about $30US. No subscription, no checking with mothership as far as I know but we weren’t too concerned with that for how we were using them. I looked a week or so ago and they seem to have a model that meets your requirements. Except it needs an app to view the footage over Wi-Fi and really to check the aim and that it’s working. Unless there is a workaround.