Blink Camera and Motioneye

Hardware
1

I recently purchased the parts necessary to assemble my first camera (Pi Zero W and an IR Pi Camera). I installed MotionEyeOS onto the Pi zero (which worked well, but does still have frame rate issues), and have MotionEye running on my HA installation. However, I didn’t realize something when I purchased the camera parts. IR won’t work for looking outside through glass (and the camera is not built for outside use).

As a result, I’ve been eyeballing the Blink cameras on Amazon. I notice that they have Cloud upload capabilities (and a supposed up to 2 year battery), however, I’m wondering if anyone has used MotionEye to control them. I also am trying to minimize the amount of cloud storage I use, especially for cameras (I worry about network security), and am wondering if the Blink camera feeds can simply be set to only talk to a local storage system.

Any recommendations? Are the Blink cameras worth it? I really don’t want to use externally powered cameras for the outside of the house, as I don’t want to poke holes in either my soffit or walls (if possible), but I do want cameras for the outside. That limits me to battery powered options, or cameras that can work inside pointing out.

2

I have only had a very quick google doesn’t look like you can use the video stream.

https://community.blinkforhome.com/t/blink-camera-stream-url/7281

Also about battery life:

Blink cameras can last for up to 2 Years* on a single pair of non-rechargeable AA Lithium batteries. This is defined as 40,000 seconds of Motion Clips and Live View. This is the average use for the majority of Blink camera systems.

That’s only about 11hrs worth of Video.
If you seriously want CCTV I would reconsider using proper cameras and using POE to connect and power them.
Most of these WiFi Cameras are just toys and rely on cloud storage and I am also yet to see one with a decent image chip in them, you want 4MP at least to be able to view anything at a distance.

3

Thanks. I wasn’t too sure, and at $70+ per camera, I didn’t want to spend the money and then find out it wouldn’t work.

I’ll probably stick with RPi based cameras. Maybe I can get an outside case that will work for me.