Ever heard of the Cab Cam ?
You do need power, but the cameras are outdoor rated at ip69k, which means they withstand thunderstorms and can be sprayed down for cleaning, and are also rated for both hot and below freezing weather.
These are NOT wifi/RTSP devices, the wireless models do run on 2.4GHz but it is not an open standard to the display.
Typically used on tractors, trailers, and mobile homes, you can jack into the trailer hitch wiring usually to get power, the display has a 12V lighter jack. The make external rechargeable batteries if there is no power available.
They also make quick attach magnetic mounts, but I am guessing the bodywork is all aluminum or stainless steel and that wont work.
They may be way overboard for your use case, but they are literally designed for it, and can be permanently mounted without fear of environmental damage.
You can use Reolink cloud for remote viewing if wanted.
But can just use them locally via their IP address.
I use mine with a Synology NAS for storage long term.
Just a quick reminder, Reolink is actually Shenzhen Baichuan Digital. Itās not entirely clear if they manufacture the hardware themselves of if they are Dahua or Hik clones. They are very opaque about it, sources claim one way or the other.
But just in case you want to use their cloud offer, keep in mind that theyāre pretty much in the same boat as Dahua and Hik, your stream will go to China. I would also keep them isolated on your local LAN.
Same, I have a load of Foscam cameras running under SecuritySpy because they are cheap and they work great. I also have some $1,000+ cameras for my critical areas, but most of my house is Foscam.
The setup is at least half the battle. Iāve been burnt hard by cameras refusing to do anything with an app of some sort. My dad got a new Amcrest wifi camera and it was a massive pain to talk him through (it didnāt just grab dhcp and show an admin page on wired, and didnāt offer a hotspot for wifi setup). Then he went and got this bird watcher wifi camera that was insane ā massively outdated, and poorly translated manuals that required ancient shitty software to configure.
While Iām not opposed to Foscam per-se, I am apprehensive about some of the newer cameras requiring anything beyond a web-browser for setup.
I would disagree with this as someone who has worked for companies that do hardware rebadging. Usually to bring the price down the rebranded camera Will be older hardware and an agreement that features may be removed to keep the price lower. Because of this the firmware updates become harder as the latest code wonāt run on the older cpu range and the agreement that the camera has x features removed means the firmware is needed to be adjusted before it is released. Sometimes an extra fee is charged to make that firmware and a company may not want to spend the money.
If it is the case that it only costs an extra $40 for a non rebranded unit I highly recommend it as money well spent for future firmware support. If you want a lower price only you can weigh the downside and put a price on it.
You not only have to worry about cameras contacting clouds but Dahua got caught with a very serious flaw a few years ago that meant your password could be retrieved by anyone in plain text if they knew a URL the camera was serving. A simple web search will turn up info on this.
While I canāt speak to any of the very newest Foscam cameras all of my others were setup easily with a local web interface.
But some of the older models I have need a plugin to work that is no longer supported by newer browsers so I had to download a ālegacyā browser (Palemoon) that still supported the plugin.
The only other thing I do is block those cameras from web access in my router so there is no potential āfunny businessā going on.