Yeah sorry I wasn’t clear, what I was wondering was if detection zone was enabled (without pan/scan) if it would return to that original position after manually moving the camera. I just set a DZ, and it warns me when moving the camera that it will return after 15 seconds. But then it doesn’t. Turns out if you have motion tracking enabled, it stays at that manual position until it tracks some motion, after which it returns to the detection zone position. Strange. If you don’t have motion tracking enabled, it returns after about 5 seconds. Guess if I’m going to keep them I’ll just learn the nuances. I mean this was a prime day impulse buy and they were cheap, I wanted an NVR with 4K and hard wired but really didn’t want to drop that kind of cash, so figure this was a good interim step at least.
You know, why not have a user interactive calibration routine to calculate the necessary offsets for each camera. It would be implemented in the app and provide the values to the camera. Similar to how touch screens used to have to be. Put a red dot or circle with crosshairs over the image, user centers it on something easy to spot, camera pans left and back, user re-centers, pans right then back, user re-centers, up, down, etc. App calculates the offsets and feeds them back to camera. Seems like it would be more effective than a one-size-fits-all offset based on an average from the production line. Of course it would require app development which is probably outsourced but given all the time and effort put in so far, I’m sure the fix hasn’t been cheap to this point.
Same issues here. No surprises.
However, to make my life a little easier, I set a single waypoint so, after a reboot, my camera returns to the place I want it to be.
I have DZ and tracking on.
Reboot Daily (when I remember).
If things don’t get solved I will go back to a static cam. Too much of a pain.
I set a rule at sunrise everyday my cameras restart I have no issues
Great idea. I may need to get one now that there is a solution. It a shame you have to do the reboot.
First the positive. Had two of these for a couple of months now with Cam +. I am blown away how rare false detections are, and how well people and vehicle detection works. We have had two other major brands in recent years, and both are easily fooled causing false notifications. Probably should not say the names, but one starts with R.
After a recent very brief power outage, the camera home position changed to all the way panned to one side. Not a big deal to reset, but a bit of an issue. Wonder if anyone else has encountered this?
The camera needs to know when it is in the home position by a bit map image comparison and the stepper home location needs to be set at the privacy location if the images are not similar form the current to the last transit home. I noticed my cameras if bumped out of position ( stepper axis slip). The position and image won’t be the same indicating the stepper has lost home position. If this is the case the camera should be sent to privacy position and home reset and then sent to the home position where it checks the image similarity for the know home. A poor camera mounting and or a significant change in the home position image could present a problem. Homing using a image comparison validation.
And therein lies the problem. They don’t do an image comparison when returning to the home position. It is based solely on movement. That is, it only recalls the X and Y coordinates. If anything slipped in the process, those coordinates will be off. To do an image comparison would be processor intensive. And what happens when your home position has something in it that moves? The two images to compare would never be the same.
Appreciate the responses. I realized I may not have been clear. By “home” I meant the view I set in detection settings. In fact, the camera did return to what might be true home, pointing straight out from the bracket. This of course breaks my detection preset.
The first instance was caused by a power cycle from an outage. I just now cycled the camera, and it did correctly return to my preset view. This is a guess, but I suspect since it could not get back online right away (my internet gear takes a long time to reboot) it just went to the default home. Going to confirm with a couple more tests. Maybe I will finally do the battery backup I’ve considered for a while now for the Router and AP.
If I were designing a system, I would reserve a few horizontal and vertical lines at the edges to be used internally to the camera assembly to optically track position.
No optical recognition needed. It knows how far it’s supposed to be spaced from the stops. It only has to verify occasionally that it’s not confused by returning back to the stops and moving back to home.
Gear lash isn’t a legitimate argument either because the camera always goes in the same steps to the same positions when I manually move them. It never deviates.
This week’s update:
Lars,
That’s not the problem. The gearing occasionally slips. So going back to the stops and then advancing so many stops would work, it doesn’t work that way. Maybe it should occasionally? I agree that would probably solve the problem. But, it moves, it skips and then it returns to “home” and because it slipped, “home” is off from where it should be.
Now, what many have done to do exactly what you mention, we’ve put in a rule to make it reset once/twice a day. That effectively does what you suggest. We’ve found it helps, but still doesn’t cure the issue because it doesn’t appear to know home is so many steps from the stops. Instead, you set home and then when it moves it counts how far it moves from there, not from the stops. If “home” was indeed X number of steps from the stops, logically, that would solve it as long as it finds the stops on occasion. I don’t think they want to do that tho because finding the stops means it essentially moves until it can’t move any further and resets to that position. That is, it’s hard on the movement mechanisms.
I guess we’ll need to wait and see if this new firmware improves things.
-Gonzo
I have my motor set on number five pretty sure that’s what came from the factory and I never have any issues I only use motion tracking I don’t allow the camera to run back and forth all day long like some people are doing
It is pretty subtle on mine, I only noticed it after quite a while. It becomes more noticeable when you have a detection zone set (especially with specific things included/excluded). I also am set to 5 with motion tracking only, and it definitely creeps. Some days more than others. Mine is facing a somewhat busy street so it tracks a lot, which I’m sure adds to how quickly/how much it gets “off”. The one in my driveway definitely takes longer to get noticeably “off”, partially because of less tracking and partially because what it does track is much slower (at least I’m assuming those are both reasons).
That is exactly why I can’t leave the Motion Tracking on with mine. Eventually the Offset Drift gets so bad that it brings the previously blocked road and cars into the included DZ and it ends up being ADHD all day.
Do you also find that the edges of the DZ also appear to just be “suggestive” or that they are more of a progressive fade into the excluded zone?
Mine consistently chase cars moving within the excluded DZ when they near the edge boundaries between the included and excluded DZ. I end up adding extra excluded blocks to the DZ which then reduces the effectiveness of the DZ since I now have to block out extra FOV real estate that I wanted monitored.
I’m still getting adjusted to detection. It seems far more sensitive to stuff closer to the camera (a small bug flying by will trigger it when a package being tossed up on my steps won’t) and stuff in the middle of the FOV seems more “detectable” too. My pan I’m just excluding a tree in the middle that blows in the wind so can’t speak to that one specifically, but my OG I have a pretty specific zone set and I haven’t seen it trigger on anything outside that zone, it does seem the smaller the zone, the less sensitive. Still toying with trying to get a good happy medium between false positives and detecting stuff I want it to detect. I can tell it won’t be perfect ever but want to minimize the noise.
I am not experiencing this on any other cam model either. Just the PanV3.
Yeah honestly I haven’t played much with DZ on the two Pan v3s, waiting on the issue to possibly be resolved, so just have some crude ones set. Mainly so it will return “home” after moving manually but that hardly ever works either when track motion is on. It waits until it tracks some motion then goes back to home.
My OGs seem to have the opposite problem, it seems you have to set the detection zone a bit bigger than you want or it isn’t sensitive enough… But I’m still toying with them to see which is better, very small DZ with 100 sensitivity, larger DZ with 50 or 60, etc.
My WYZE Cam Pan V3 has a mind of it’s own.
It cannot hold a position. It wonders all over the place. When it stops , it usually is zoomed in to a view it has chosen on it’s own. I have reinstalled app… Changed setting. Extremely frustrating considering I bought this camera to help with a problem that needed eyes on.
I don’t know what I can do to keep this camera focused on one area.