I bought this camera and tried setting it up. It will not connect to wifi, no matter what I do. I have two 2.4G AND 5G
networks and one 2.4G backwards compatible
network. Though the (awful!) sound pairing seems to work, it will even say that it has been connected to the networkÂą, but not connect to the app.
Âą it has not! I use UniFi
hardware with a pfSense
DHCP server. Neither of those register the camera as connected; if either of those did, they would (pfSense) assign it an IP address, or (UniFi) display it as a new client.
While one could sniff the traffic for pan/tilt, I currently do not see the point. I was only able to get it working via ethernet cable. However! Now I can view the rtsp
stream via phone (tinyCam Pro
) or in Home Assistant (generic camera
with rtsp
), but it is not able to connect to the app any longer!!
I am not sure whether I have to grant both the app, and the camera, internet access for connecting with each other… I granted the app access on my phone (with AFWall+
; it usually is not allowed to connect to the internet, nor make any local connections; obviously I had to turn this off so it would be able to connect to the camera) as well as granted the camera internet access in my firewall. But the app will not connect until I reset the camera and start the entire pairing process over - and even then it will not always work reliably.
I really, really hope somebody will create a custom firmware similar to this. Especially because the camera even supports two-way audio. It would be perfect being able to not need the ewelink
app, yet use all of it’s features; I mean, even if you can pan/tilt via Home Assistant / rtsp, you still wouldn’t be able to use the two-way audio feature, right?
Other than that… it is a great camera! The quality is amazing (even in complete darkness; it’s infrared night mode seems considerably better than the Xiaomi Dafang
, which I also use). Pan/tilt is incredibly silent. And finally a camera with two-way audio; while the Dafang can play back locally stored audio, I have not found a way to use it to send live audio to it’s speakers.