Hi All,
Since I don’t have the opportunity to run a CAT6 cable and power lines to the different positions I would want a camera to monitor our interior and exterior of the house, I have been looking into wireless battery powered cameras.
The use case for these cameras would be:
Record clips of activity during certain times of day
Detect motion from the camera to trigger certain automations
I have tried to get the Reolink Argus 2 cameras to work with ZoneMinder and HomeAssistant but I haven’t had much success accomplish the two use cases above.
Anyone else had any success with a particular camera brand? Friends have told me that Arlo and Canary brands don’t work with these use cases but I haven’t tested them.
I’m not extremely concerned with having to replace the batteries on the camera a handful of times a year since I believe that can be tuned by the automation routines and their frequency.
I’ve looked into battery powered cameras but nothing seems to appeal. Because battery-powered cameras are still fairly niche and need to operate differently to wired cameras they don’t seem to use open standards such as ONVIF etc and you are likely tied to a platform / app. The risk there is that the platform is either totally closed and doesn’t allow third party access. Or it depends on the cloud and is therefore susceptible to disappearing in a few years or blocking access, which I think most of us HASSIO users would rather avoid.
My ideal battery-powered camera would be a cheap standalone device with built-in PIR that automatically captures a still image and a 20 second clip whenever PIR motion is detected, and uploads these to separate FTP folders, and then goes back to sleep. At least then in HASSIO I could monitor the folders and build notifications fairly simply. I’ve not found anything like this though.
If you buy decent IP cameras you don’t need to run CATx and Power cables.
You can just use them over POE.
What are the reasons you can’t run cable?
If you are worried about drilling, your house isn’t air tight and there are plenty of spots to get cable through. Air bricks, gaps around your soffits etc. Worse case once you get your cable outside you could cable tie it to your guttering for support.
The other problem with battery and WiFi cameras in general is the image quality.
Most are only running 720P or if you are lucky some claim to be up to 1080P. Unless you are viewing a very small area up close you wont see much detail. So the images wont help to identify your subject.
Also you probably wont have the IR power to see far in the dark either.
If you are viewing your garden or a large drive in pitch black you will want decent IR like an EXIR.
Like @jdbrookes mentions you will likely be stuck with their app or cloud solution.
You will be hard pushed to find ones with a RTSP stream or ONVIF support, so you wont be able to integrate them with an NVR or something like Machinebox etc.