Wireless Surveillance

I bought a new, solar powered, Wi-Fi, CCTV camera from China a couple of weeks ago to replace the wired one I'd previously bought - it finally arrived on Saturday. A wired system simply isn't a practical proposition.

The first problem was fitting the rechargeable Lithium batteries - they were a smidgen too long for the battery case and, try as I might, they just wouldn't go in. I looked up the problem on YouTube and discovered that most Lithium batteries have a small printed circuit fitted to one end with a metal strip that runs to the other end, which has to be removed to make them fit. How daft is that?

Once I'd overcome that problem it was time to tackle the Chinglish instruction manual and the phone app that controls the camera - that was a nightmare. Some three hours and a lot of head scratching later I had success and managed to receive a transmission in Mission Control in full colour and HD.

OK, the image above is in black and white, but that's because it's using IR night vision trained on my back door at half past midnight. A distinct advantage - besides the lack of cables - is that there's no need for a central black box, as there is with a wired system, so it's less expensive to set up. Additional cameras can be easily added at will - all you have to do is login to the camera's own Wi-Fi, set it up to access the house Wi-Fi and then login to the camera via the house router. I can login from anywhere in the world using a local Wi-Fi Hotspot or my phone's native data service. Data usage isn't anywhere near as high as I thought it would be.

All I now need to automatically record activity using the PIR sensor as a trigger is an SD card, although I can make recordings manually on my phone without an SD card or a cloud account and get notifications of any PIR sensor activity. I'm now constantly alerted to cat activity at the cat-flap, which is very informative.

I can talk from anywhere on my phone to anyone near the camera, as well as hear any activity near the camera, which would be handy for deliveries when not home.

On the strength of this purchase I've bought 2 more cameras from the same source in China at £52 each, which will probably take another 3 weeks to arrive, despite the eBay listing showing 3 days, although it's worth it to get 50% off. Kitty won't know what hit her. We could set up an Autumn Watch layout to monitor animal activity around the house.

I have yet to test the performance of the solar cell in recharging the Lithium battery pack. The camera seems to go into hibernation mode when not being used, consuming minimal power to monitor PIR activity, and then begins to drain power when activated - so it's not recording continually, like most wired systems.