Mixed experience - camera used to track pets and wildlife

Cameras
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1

I do not know yet. Camera looks OK and separate solar panel looks as a great idea. Minor issues like can’t see event video on one of computers are explainable.

But

  • camera records only short videos on pets or wildlife, Why can’t not I configure it so it always record 30 seconds after any pet event and 15 after moving event, and do not record ‘persons’?
  • Camera do not detect pets in 50% cases except if they are in front of it. So it missed a lot. Maybe it’s location based but it is annoying.
  • Camera takes a lot of time to detect movement, So it missed events. For example it points to cat’s door and cat exits; camera fire up only when cat is fully outside (or miss it all together).
  • SD interface is very strange. Plus it requires to be - what, on the same WiFi, on on BT distance, or what? IT is not documented at all.

So I do not know yet. I do not need it in the cloud, SSD can be OK (through $3 / month is not big deal). But we started to see so many limitations that we started to consider changing vendor.

2

Pretty much the answer to all your questions is that the battery cams have to use much more power conservation than the wired ones, and due to that, they take longer to pick things up and aren’t as sensitive.

SD card can be accessed from anywhere, if you’re on the same network, it streams over your LAN, if you’re away from home or on a different network, it streams via the Wyze servers. All communication uses wifi, the bluetooth is only for the initial camera setup, doesn’t do anything other than that.

3

For the cat door, it might help to aim the camera so the cat walks across the frame rather than straight away from it, since the motion sensor on the battery cams reacts much faster to side to side movement. As far as I know you can’t set different clip lengths per event type, but in the camera’s Event Recording settings you can pick which smart detections trigger a recording, so unchecking Person should stop those clips. It’s also worth checking the cooldown setting there, since a long cooldown would explain missing the cat coming back in.