I have looked at Blink and they seem to be a good option, but there could be other products on the market that I have not seen yet and at a lower price point or have better features. Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks, I do like the sound of those ones. Rechargeable is good as long as they don’t need recharging too often. The 2-way audio and the option of cloud and local backup is nice too.
Downside is they are more expensive, but I guess you sometimes get what you pay for.
i wouldnt trust any cam on a battery if you connect it to homeassistant.
battery and solar powered cams need to save as much power as they can.
so they only use the wifi and send data when there is a reason. for instance when you take a look at it or when there is motion detected and it records something.
those cams are not created to send data 24 hours a day.
and thats exactly what you ask from it when you connect it to homeassistant.
so i expect that no battery or solarpowered battery will be strong enough to give a dependable 24/7 connection.
i could be wrong, but i did chose to wire my cams, rather then spending a lot of money and find out that it wont work.
I can understand that point. Thanks for the advice!
Be interested to hear anyone’s experience of wireless cams in home assistant. I’m sure i’ve seen a few people certainly using Blink cameras with home assistant.
so if you open hass when you are at home you get no camview?
i guess the hass component must be completely different from other cams(foscams for instance)
because when my foscam is offline i get a warning in hass every 10 seconds.
when its not offline hass connects to it, so then the wifi from the cam is used.
and how do you arm it? by a hardware switch?
and does it also have infrared? that cant be a very powerfull led if it uses almost no power.
It has an Arm service, which I trigger using automations and presence detections, as well as having it setup on one of my Hue remotes by the front door. My version does not have IR, although the lights in the hallway (where it sits) are motion triggered anyway. Blink has a forum, so you could seek more detailed answers there
i am impressed by the battery use from that cam.
i know that there are also wildlife cams that run for quite some time.
but obviously there are some restrictions.
good IR and PTZ are not possible.without using quite a lot from the battery.
but thanks for sharing your info, it helps me see things in perspective.
The XT would be what I would be purchasing as I want an outside camera. The battery life does sound very good compared to other battery powered cameras I have looked at on the market. I guess the lifespan of the battery will ultimately come down to how often it is triggered.
I would ideally like a system that shows real time images in HA and records when it detects motion, but perhaps that would only be realistic with a wired set up due to the power it would use.
So if I am understanding this properly, with the Activate option you have in home assistant that then gives you real time images? Therefore its not feeding the images constantly and wasting battery, but you can see them whenever you open home assistant if you wish to?
Should also be mentioned that as far as I know, the Blink integration into HA is not officially supported? I think Blink only officially support SmartThings and IFTTT? That could mean support being broken at any time. Back when I backed it on Kickstarter I am sure they said they would allow for integration to various HA systems, but much like the promised local storage, its not happened (yet).
Battery should last approx 2 years with “standard” use. From their FAQ: Standard use is defined as 8,000 five-second events per year (or 40,000 total seconds of video recording, to include Live View usage).
So around 11 hours.
I’ve got many different cameras and they all have their pro’s and con’s. Blink are great for just sticking up somewhere out of the way, if you are in a controlled environment and mainly want it for alerts. If you want streaming you are better off with a wired device (for power at the very least).
thx for this extra info.
my cam records for 10 to 30 minutes a day, so that would mean it wouldnt last a month in my case.
and parts from it also it nighttime so i would need IR (now i have a seperate IR extra to have enough to cover the area)
that would probably mean that with extra use from live view i would need to recharge every 2 weeks or so.
thats more in the area of what i expected that was possible.
I suppose I don’t really have any reason to be able to see a stream. As long as its recording when it picks up movement that’s the main thing. Otherwise i’m going to have to pay somebody to come and wire a system up for me, which would go over my ideal budget.
