What battery powered outdoor cameras work with HA without dramatic power drain?

Hardware
1

I have been looking at integrating this camera in HA: Altas PT Ultra - 4K continuous recording, 360-degree Pan & Tilt, Wi-Fi 6 battery camera with colorx night vision | Reolink Official

This will be solar powered with a battery. When I look further into it I found:

  1. HA usually polls which drains the battery which can be disabled
  2. HA has no integration with the battery powered version of these cameras due to API limitations.

I then looked for any other camera which fulfils both these requests:

  1. Integrates with HA
  2. Works via events or any other method which does not drain the battery

For the life of me I can't find anything. Does anyone know of any battery powered cameras of a similar spec and price which does this?

Thanks in advance!

2

Reolink and Aqara cameras are usually the two that are recommended for this when it comes to HA integration due to all the options they support.

Paul Hibbert has done and still does a lot of reviews of these that should match your needs and may have a video of the one you linked.

edit: found the review of it -

3

I forgot to mention that I did not want to buy a hub for a single device. Is there anything which works which does not need a hub? @TH3xR34P3R your example requires a hub.

4

Aqara has models that do not require hubs. I have a few.

5

A hub for a camera... :thinking:
If the camera exposes a RTSP stream, they all do work.

6

Most cameras that are ONVIF compatible you can setup with any NVR or NAS of your choice, you just need to see if they have the option in the spec for the ones available and suggested.

7

Thank you all for the help. I am still a bit confused. What camera exactly fits the requirements.

I wanted altas-pt-ultra originally since it:

  • Works from battery over solar
  • Works at night since it as a security camera
  • Works with the long winters we have in the UK
  • Works with HA without draining the battery (At least I thought it did)
  • Does not require a Hub (At least I thought it did)

Are there any specific setups or suggestions you have which fit all of these?

Thank you all again for the help.

8

Both have nothing to do with HA and AFAIK camera's don't have a hub.
For your other points: it all depends what you want/need.

And as already mentioned: if ONVIF supported, they might even be easier to setup.

9

NEVER believe the manufacturer's claim that you need to buy their hub. Reolink is in the "Works With Home Assistant" club. I think that the latest upgrade to Home Assistant included support for Reolink battery-powered cameras, but I am not sure.

I take claims of 24-hour power on battery with great skepticism.

10

I think in this case its a matter of features from the integration in HA what works with and without the hub for those camera's that is where the confusion may be coming from for certain users.

I would hope that those that have had a chance to look over them test them without the hub to compare.

11

Hi there,
I actually am in the same position as you : how can I connect my Reolink doorbell to HA ? Well I spent time searching and I finally found the perfect solution : a fork of neolink : GitHub - mgc8/bairelay: A pure-Rust bridge between Reolink battery cameras (using the proprietary "Baichuan") and standard RTSP / MQTT, including a local replacement for Reolink's wake-up cloud and motion-push channel. · GitHub

I just did the configuration and so far so good ! Great job from the author because neolink was not quite reliable...

Have a nice day

12

Actually, there is an update of Reolink integration : Bump reolink_aio to 0.20.0: Reolink battery camera support by starkillerOG · Pull Request #171836 · home-assistant/core · GitHub
It seems that Reolink battery camera are now supported !

13

Thank you all for the help. This has been very useful.

As @Zeroth25 points out this looks the most promising:

The issue with this though is it is very beta and looks to be missing lots of key features I need for it to work as a security camera.

I am not an expert but I think the limitation with anything RTSP or ONVIF is that this will drain the battery by generating a continuous stream. Hence why reolink uses a proprietary protocol. I don't understand why this is the case but from reading this seems to be the case.

Looks like I need a wired camera for this to work at all. The battery one might work at some point in the future but not now.

Thanks again.

14

Yes if you have the option always do a wired camera instead of wireless where possible as its a more secure option.

15

Indeed ! Use battery caméras for security purpose is not recommanded. If possible, use wired caméras instead.

Have a Nice day