Can the pan follow function be shutoff in the settings so it just looks at one location always?
Welcome to the Forum, @Brians! 
Yes. Beneath the video feed in live view, there should be a ribbon or strip of controls (starting with SD Card on the left, then Take Photo, etc.). You can swipe this from right-to-left to reveal Track Motion and Pan Scan, and you can tap these on or off. They should be green when on and grey when off. If you have both of those options turned off, then the camera should essentially remain set wherever you decide to point it.
There are 3 modes
Stay in one place unless you move it manually
Track Motion
Pan/Scan where you set “waypoints” you want it to alternate between, I believe it is up to 3 or 4 waypoints and it moves every 5 to 10 seconds (I don’t use that mode so don’t recall exactly).
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Thank you!
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Additionally, there’s a setting in the detection settings called “detection zone”. This setting shows a fine grid over the camera view and you can draw on the grid to turn individual squares on or off. The squares you turn off will not detect motion. Very useful for ignoringing certain areas in the cameras view.
Anyways. If you want the camera to always face one direction you can turn off the track motion and pan settings, as already described. But if you pan and tilt the camera by swiping on the live view or using the directional arrows then the camera will stay where you moved it to. But if you turn on the detection zone, and then pan and tilt, it will move back to its original position after 15 seconds. The original position being the position it was in when you set the detection zone area.
Dang, that was hard to describe lol.
I’ve never quite figured out DZ on the Pan v3, but as far as I can tell, when track motion is enabled, it doesn’t stop it from tracking motion outside the detection zone, only from logging an event. But then because the camera has moved, your detection zone has also moved, and then it will log an event if something keeps moving in that previously excluded area.
I gave up trying to make any sense of it, I don’t have alerts enabled for either of those cameras so not a huge deal. As far as I’ve seen, DZ when combined with track motion is basically of little to no use.
Well actually its main use is having the camera return to “home” position after you move it manually as you mentioned (I don’t think you need pan/scan or track motion enabled, only DZ for that), but I’ve actually found I often have to return it “home” manually using the waypoint I set for that purpose, sometimes it doesn’t do it by itself. Other times it does it within a couple seconds of you moving the camera.
It is somewhat erratic in its logic, I think some things conflict with others, but I still really like the cameras.
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Thank you!
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Huh, I didn’t know that. I never used the track motion setting because the cameras field of view of wide enough for the room. My main reason for buying it was the privacy mode. It returns to the same position after going in and out of privacy mode so it’s the perfect camera for indoors where you want privacy while at home.
But the way you described it in your first paragraph does make sense. It ignores the blocked detection zone unless something moves into it from the unblocked area. But then the detection zone moves with the camera and doesn’t quite work properly until it returns to it’s original position. I think I’d prefer it to work that way if I used the track motion feature but I can see how things could a little out of control lol. Good to know.
I’m not even sure I could explain precisely how it works if I spent an hour observing and toying with it. The main thing for me is the one in my driveway, which I only want watching my cars, and to follow someone if they walk into my back yard, will track headlights of cars driving by on the street which is pretty far away and definitely excluded. But I don’t believe an event is logged unless there is a second motion in what is now the “included” zone.
Actually that is the one cam where I need to use the IR LEDs as there isn’t much ambient light in my driveway. And the bugs attracted by them drive the track motion wild anyway. There was rumor that enabling the LEDs only if motion is detected might get added to the rule actions at some point but never seemed to go anywhere.
It would actually be nice to have “detection zone” and separate “tracking zone”. Especially if you can limit how far the camera will track (sometimes it ends up staring straight at the wall as it tracked the reflection of its own LEDs). But I’m not expecting anything like that, haven’t seen it in any of the features they’re considering. I’m guessing at this point they’re already working on the Pan v4.
Honestly I’m too nervous to even trust privacy mode indoors. I do have a spare Pan v3 that I set up inside when I travel, but other than that, no wifi/cloud enabled cams indoors for me (other than the two facing the exterior doors), if I walk outside buck ass naked, I got bigger problems at that point.
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You mean you can’t just screen this out with the Detection Zone? 
Out of curiosity, how would you imagine something like this working? I’m trying to visualize it, because—as I noted elsewhere recently—I do use Track Motion but do not use Pan Scan or Detection Zone on my Cam Pan v3s. Some of those features seem almost mutually exclusive in function, or at least they can interfere with each other enough that it doesn’t seem worth the trouble to figure out.
Seems like I’ve read elsewhere on the Forum about people using a separate IR emitter away from the camera so that Night Vision Mode can be set to On but with the camera’s own IR lights off specifically to account for the flying bugs.
I concur.
With my Cam Pan v3s set as I described earlier, I have 3 Waypoints set on each, and when I manually tap one that seems to become the camera’s “home” position. Even after the cameras move when tracking motion or go through periodic reset cycles (using a Schedule Rule to do both “Restart the camera” and “Reset Position”), they’re returning to their “home” positions pretty consistently without my intervention.
The thought being that you could tell it not to start tracking motion that is outside the detection zone (set it to the same as the detection zone) or even set it differently in cases where that is useful. Honestly I expected the detection zone to also tell it what motion to ignore/not track, but in my experience that isn’t the case. It might get a bit confusing, but no more than it is now. It would also be nice to have a limit so it won’t randomly look up at the sky or at a wall etc. I don’t expect either feature to come to the Pan v3. Maybe the v4 or v5. Though it does seem like it would be relatively easy for them to just make track motion abide by the detection zone, eliminating the seemingly conflicting features. Who knows, maybe it does work this way but when the camera is in night mode (which is when the car headlights start getting tracked) there is IR light that the camera picks up but we can’t see. Like you say, it was just too much to try and figure out and rationalize. I suppose if I wanted alerts for those two areas, I can set the Pan to static position, and get another OG or a v4 to cover the yard. Hasn’t been a big need so far.
Yes I saw that too, here and also on Reddit. The issue is depending on the wavelength of the IR lights you get, they can cause the camera to cycle in and out of night vision mode. Seems to be luck of the draw, I haven’t seen anyone post which wavelength caused this and which one didn’t. There is actually a feature request to be able to schedule night mode on the camera rather than just have it “automatic” to eliminate that behavior. Also in my case I’d probably need 2 of them to cover the area. And it is extra effort and overkill for me. Honestly as long as it continues tracking motion on the street in the excluded zone, I can’t turn on alerts anyway, so if it is chasing some bugs around, no big deal, (maybe some shorter life on the motor). Even if it is chasing bugs, a person or vehicle will “grab its attention” and it will start tracking that instead, guess it has enough intelligence to go for the largest object.
I believe when I played around with that, it would not return home after you manually move it, whereas with detection zone it eventually does. Though I do have a “home” waypoint set and just tap that after moving it manually typically anyway, but it is nice to know if I forget that it will eventually go back. With pan/scan and track motion disabled, yes from what I recall, reset motor or reboot camera does return to the last position the camera was set at (even if not a waypoint, it can be a spot you manually set). But I want mine to always end up at the main home position regardless of what I do, so even a DZ with a single useless block greyed out does this.
The one on the front of my house makes the behavior of DZ with track motion more obvious. It was windy today and I have a very flexible tree. When camera is in home position and I have that tree greyed out, it does not put any green boxes. But a car drives by and the camera moves, suddenly it is green boxing the tree like crazy. The tree is about dead center in the field of view so the camera doesn’t track it normally, and I don’t know if that is because it is excluded from DZ (I don’t think so as that’s not how my driveway cam behaves) or just because it is centered and no movement is needed.
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That sounds frustrating. Just a thought, the floodlight V2 looks pretty nice. It has its own special camera with a 160 degree field of view. Perfect for a driveway. Maybe it would be able to see people walk into your backyard?
The motion tracking actually works extremely well and can follow someone from my driveway into the yard and see exactly what they do there. Where I have it set up it can get around 270 degree field of view that way. It would be nice to be able to control the motion tracking, set limits and areas to ignore, but it isn’t a critical feature for me.
One time when I was away for a few days I turned off motion tracking and the IR LEDs and enabled notifications, and it worked fine. Had someone gone into my yard it would not have recorded where they went/what they did, but it would have gotten a pretty good look at them on their way up the driveway. And in reality, the truck is the item with the two expensive catalytic converters on it (won’t fit in the garage) so that’s the main area of focus and the camera’s “home” position.
Maybe things they’ll consider for future versions of the cam. I could certainly add an OG or v4 facing the yard and leave the pan static (only moving it when I want to see something better) but I’ve gotten used to the limitations and it works well for my needs.
That’s good. I’m pretty happy with mine too. Probably the best camera they have just for the pan and tilt and privacy mode.
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