Hello, I am new to the topic of smart home and am interested in finding an outdoor security camera that will work with it. Every camera I look at doesn’t mention Home Assistant though and some of them look like they will only work with their own app.
How do I find cameras that will work with HA? Is there a certain term I should be searching for? I’m trying to find an outdoor, wireless, solar powered camera.
The two key terms are RTSP and ONVIF - if either of those are supported you should be fine.
Of course, I doubt there’s many wireless solar powered cameras that support either of those.
I have only one camera and this is doorbell camera on intercom and this is poe device. I think that any poe camera will do. For wireless cameras this could be a bumpy road because lots of them are working over app using cloud. Try to find integration for wifi camera official or unofficial aka hacks to see which cameras are supported.
solar powered is kinda describing ‘battery powered’ to me. Be aware that battery powered devices are not really usefull for integrating in HA. I have a imou camera, the way it activates and puts out a image/video stream, its always too slow. The action has already passed before the image is available in HA.
On the RTSP logic if they support, will drain you battery in few hours.
So better have good power source to have continous rtsp/onvif connection from HA at startup, then you have nice image/video options in HA.
Thanks, those two terms have helped a lot. And yeah, I couldn’t find a solar one but that’s fine.
I was kind of worried this would be the case. Guess I’ll just look for wired then. Thanks.