Anyone had any luck using home security cameras in the wild. Our trailcams are working well, but some cool stuff coming, pricing is not terrible ~$300+
AI detects pets, and probably ignores them. 4G subscription needed so running costs to consider. IR illumination and noises may scare away what we are chasing. Pan/Tilt sounds like a noisy liability.
Heya, I’m using unifi protect cams and have even used one of their pan tilt offerings, but in the end found it better to install more of their cheaper (non pan tilt ) PoE (power over Ethernet) cams for better coverage. Bit of a funny setup with my network, putting WiFi router and PoE switch in box out in garden, and the then running 50-100 m Ethernet cables out to further out areas like orchard.
I can’t say that I’d recommend setups like this to most, because cost of cams, switches, outdoor Ethernet cables, and box for recordings etc adds up. But the upsides for me have been worth it. I know now exactly when to focus on rebating and where to move traps, once I see a new possum pop up on cams. It becomes super obvious what all the likely paths are when you see the footage.
Trailcams have their limitions in that they only record a video after detecting motion. My experience with several trailcams is that can be pretty unreliable. And, of course, you rarely see the whole event.
I use a “home security” camera, as you describe it, attached to the outside of my house observing an adjacent tree with an AT220. Or sometimes a Timms trap. Or sometimes a cage trap located on the ground just below the tree. This camera, with continuous infrared illumination at night, records 24/7 to multiple 35 minute 250MB MKV files transmitted wirelessly to a server running in my house. Separately, the camera transmits an individual image to the server every minute. A simple script file allows me to scroll very quickly all those single images first thing in the morning. Alerting me to any activity which I can then investigate further by going to the appropriate MKV file.
Obviously, the disadvantage of this approach is that the viewing isn’t “in the wild”. It would be challenging to replace the electrical power needed to operate the camera and server with a battery.
I use ring cameras in the chicken coop and around the property to detect pests. With a subscription you can save to the cloud so if you dont want to check the footage once something is detected you can view later on.
I dont have them too far from the house as they need wifi but you can get some decent extenders to reach further out. We were using a small mouse trap and noticed it kept going off but no catch. Once the camera was put half a meter away from trap we found we were dealing with a rat.
Thanks for the great chat the other day! Here is some footage from my TP-Link Tapo G615G Camera. Solar/Battery + 4G. I’ve chucked it in the bush behind my property. It has the Pan/tilt and hasn’t seem to have scared the feral cat nor couple of bunny rabbits I’ve caught on film.
I’ll likely be getting another one and using them to monitor interaction with my live capture cages (I already have sensors on the cages, but I’d like to know if animals are seeing them and not going into them for some reason.
That solar cam, if that’s working for you seems great. And using hardware you already have, like Ring, also seems like a win. Whatever helps to stop you from burning out on keeping traps baited when you need them to be.
In my experience if you use motion capture events only in wide open areas, you’ll likely be missing detections of possum. I discovered this when switching from record motion events only, to record all video. Nights eyes in the distance frequently would popup without triggering a motion event. So now I just scrub through the locally stored video, sometimes dropping to 8x playback.
Dan, thanks for sending me down this journey of discovery, The video you attached speaks volumes - Cats not spooked by IR or sound (is it a deaf blind cat ? and looks to answer our basic trailcam questions - wtf is going on around here…
Low light vision looks up to task but guessing a bit of ambient light around at 830pm
Didnt see the ai boundingbox eg Cat 0.99 so guessing AI was not processing.
From the specs - the camera has no wifi connection - LTE / ethernet only, so your playback was over the mobile network.
Lots of compression artifacts, so good for low bandwidth. Guessing better bandwidth/res picture/vid is on the SDCard if installed
Will look to get one of these beauties up and running locally. We have dotterel chicks on shellbanks - $300 is a bit spendy for public accessible locations, but def good for our less exposed locations.
Update: did a bit more phoning around, from the conversations (and possible misinformation)
The tapo 615g looks excellent -
4G/LTE ONLY - ie No Wifi or ethernet/PoE - so cant re-use as a 2nd life security/trail cam at home
does not need Cloud which is $nzd 6/month as tapo app can connect directly to the camera for live streaming, review alerts, and upload pictures/videos (im told)
clearly DOES need a 4G subscription.
has visible to animals IR and pant/tilt which makes noises.
Onboard AI classification - so may tag videos/pics eg “pet”
Data costs
Im investigating hologram.io as a provider (international but uses all local carriers)
Simcard - $6 + $50 postage (d’oh)
monthly $1/sim
data nz $0.03/MB = $30/GB so ~$10/hr live streaming (lots of assumptions and bad math alert)
so cheap enough to check highlighted videos and upload the interesting bits. SDcard for hi-res ??
We run live capture cages with Lora sensors, It may be worth investigating using the camera based alerting as we usually deploy trailcams with the live cages, saving on sensor and network cost duplication. More work needed, but it may take $100 off the live trap setup cost.
Please keep sharing your knowledge - Community trapping and landcare groups NZ wide standardising on proven tools will save us money, time, effort, blood and get us to where we need to be.
Any NZ Telco’s or wireless providers - please feel free to chip in, LTE and DTC are changing our game, we’d love a local (nationwide) vendor to step up for community led predator control groups. We need a nationwide predator free smart network (and standard hardware) to meet our PF2050 goals - [your name here]
Availability on these cameras is not so good, backorder (4-6w) or out of stock in NZ. Amazon ??
A few tapo type video’s available - this guy did an excellent review on a similar camera (not 4G but 4K and similar) c660. He’s included raw 4K video from some of the night modes with some wildlife suggesting the triggering, tracking and video quality are better than the trailcams i’ve been using.
I have 2 Eufy SoloCam S220 cameras (they are solar powered) connected to a S380 Homebase.
Great to be able to look at the footage from anywhere that I am online.
I have the cameras setup near my traps (1 is about 1m away from a Victor and Doc200 and the other camera about 5m away from another Victor trap). These give me great quality images of mice, hedgehogs, rats which you would expect as they are so close to the traps and the ground.
One camera is in slight bush cover and it still gets enough light to keep charged.
Main challenge I have is that during the day when it is windy (we are in Wellington so that is most days) the tree shadows give video movement triggers. Shame the AI has not worked out that movement enough to not record them.
cheers, absolutely. Please dont wait for me to report back, - i will but timelines…
Security cams seem to fall into wired or wireless “battery” cameras.
The battery cameras are 4G / LTE only, (as in no ethernet or PoE or Wifi) which means data plans and prices and no 2nd life… NZ is 10x portugal for data costs (50GB prepay in portugal is 4Euro vs $70/month here) so just be aware that getting any hi def footage of the camera means pulling sd cards or buying Spark/One/2 a new private jet.
There is a lot of misinformation published about the cameras also in the forums, maybe from competitors, eg Tapo is blocking open source apps like Home Assistant from connecting etc. Hard to validate, and i hesitate to even comment on it.
Re finding an empty trap - thats the golden use case for these tools. This is from a $79 jaycar trailcam (no longer available) (spoiler alert, no animals harmed in the following video)
Some of the new lte security cameras take up to a minute to wake up and start recording. The trailcam video above missed the ferret being caught - we’ve learnt they are a “go for it” animal, no mucking around. A fast wakeup is key to answer those tripped traps, no pest found… questions.
Black friday sales are now on - now is a good time to “evaluate” new tech - let us know how you get on.
Vendors who can land a product in the sweet spot will do very well in the NZ market. Im happy to help them succeed - but hey Predator Free 2050 - if you are listening - this is your moment to empower community trapping.
Argh ! - 4G LTE trail cams are no longer on my shopping list - 4G data is too expensive in NZ.
As these cameras are 4G only, all video requires a plan, so setup, testing, downloading video for youtube with the exception of removal of the sdcard (which appears under a screwed in tag on some)
NZ 4G plans are not video friendly, a quick chatGPT question what does it cost to run a trailcam for 1hour/month generated the following table - which is a PER CAMERA price and excludes your mobile data plan if you are not on wifi when you receive it.
(let me know if this is unrealistic - or 1h/month is unrealistic high or low, or where cheap data lives)
These camera’s are potentially excellent, but outside the budget of the groups im involved with operate on a monthly/yearly basis. Maybe there is a better way to run them, but small data plans get very expensive if you go over even by a little or stop working if you set them up not to. I’ll keep an eye on this tech going forward but sadly, we cant cover thousand dollar data costs from our cameras, or restrict viewing to an hour a month or less.
Next steps - look into “battery” security cameras that do wifi and use that to upload/download video when visiting the cameras. Skip the monthly comms charges
Keep posting your experiences, and links to raw video if available for comparisons. Thanks.
Ouch yeah those cellular costs add up :-/ I sure do like the convenience of having setup for monitoring possum. For instance a PoE cam (Ethernet data and power over the single wire) got video of possum last night in orchard after a couple of weeks of no activity.
So will be moving all the traps and will be baiting this evening
Even though I don’t have subscription fees, my one off costs were high
I purchased a couple of Tapo c460’s today - Battery powered 4K with solar but Wifi cameras with $60 256GB SDcards. I’ll write these up, but these $195 (on sale) cameras are stunning, and the software impressive.
Davo - i believe… Cacophony is 1500++ and CSL didnt give any prices, but must be in that space also. Both have put a lot of time into training so high costs specific to NZ, so they need to recoup their costs i guess. Do we need species specific AI, the Tapo does “Pet” which im hoping is good enough for videos without any further consequences
Running costs - im hoping my costs were too high on the 4G, the Tapo 4K is streaming live view via Wifi at around 200KB/sec when i connect to it so if that was over 4G, and 2degrees mobile ($20/GB) then $14/hr to use 1 camera, so we’re paying up or driving out to pick up sdcards and reviewing.
So my test security cameras are up and running, just need some critters to run past, and then i need to test how well they work offline onto the sdcard only. The Tapo security cameras seem to be video only - no option to generate still pics, except via their optional cloud service.
Challenge ahead, prices are good at the moment due to Sales, Im hoping my pick will be available for a while, so if does turn out to be a (non 4G/remote) good trailcam option - we can all get good videos.
and looks to answer our basic trailcam questions - wtf is going on around here…
