Not sure if right thread - need advice on outdoor WIFI IP camera

Marble68

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I have a remote cabin with an LTE connection for Internet.

I am going to put a raspberry pi there to act as an ftp server, and to email me alerts (but not images to keep bandwidth down).

I'm trying to find a solar powered IP camera that uses wifi, has motion detection, and will send stills to an FTP server.

My plan is to use the raspberry pi and a neural network processor to analyze stills and email me if a person is on the steps, etc.

It seems like all the solar powered cameras use cloud storage, which would burn through my bandwidth way too fast.

In effect, I'm trying to find a weatherproof Foscam camera that's solar powered.

Anyone know of such an animal?
 

TonyR

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Don't you have utility power there for the LTE and the pi? Solar has its own issues, as does Wi-Fi.

Also, if you're concerned with FTPing an image falsely, consider a PIR sensor on those steps to provide a logical AND for the camera and/or pi to decide to FTP an alert image.

FWIW, I've been using an Amcrest IP2M-841 on my front porch for 3 years to watch for packages. It's NOT an outdoor cam but where I have it placed it's not directly exposed to rain and sun and it seems to fair well there. A re-branded Dahua, it is ONVIF compatible, provides RTSP, is 1080p, IR, 2-way audio plus mike in/speaker out, has pan/tilt/digital zoom, record to micro SD card, wired or wireless and has alarm in/out, great with Blue Iris, VLC, etc. Comes with wall/ceiling mount, 1/4"-20 tripod mount female insert on bottom. Available in black or white for under $40 ! And I have tested it's self-contained FTP to advise another user (I use Blue Iris instead) and it does work.
 
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Marble68

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Yes, I have utility power.

I'm not too concerned about false alerts being uploaded to the RPi. What I am concerned about is the camera uploading over the LTE connection on false alerts and using up all my LTE data.

On the RPi, I'll expect to use some custom computer vision code, leveraging some basic neural network analysis on the pictures, and have that use the LTE connection. (I'd be writing the code, I have several Intel neural network sticks, and an older generation would be more than capable).

Most of these smart cameras I see will store locally to SD, or to the sellers "cloud" service.

While that sounds great, I have no idea how much data they'd use. I measured my drop cam and that thing uploads many, many GB of data - however, it's continuous stream to the cloud.

I'm only at my cabin about 3 or 4 times a year. So, by using a pre-paid data plan and an LTE router, I can maintain a connection there in an affordable manner. I'm using Cricket's 20GB for $30 a month plan.

Alternatively, if the camera's false alerts were very few, emailing me a grab wouldn't be bad either.

I just need to make sure the camera doesn't gobble up the bandwidth.
 

TonyR

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I get your concept, it is clearly stated.

The IP2M-841 does NOT require any sort of cloud to FTP or e-mail alerts.
 

SouthernYankee

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Just a heads up on LTE.

On an LTE network connections it may not have an IP address that will remain constant for any period of time. This may prevent you from logging into the camera ever.

If you need to log into the camera look at setting ngrok or Hamachi. ( i have not used these)
 

Marble68

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I get your concept, it is clearly stated.

The IP2M-841 does NOT require any sort of cloud to FTP or e-mail alerts.
This would work if it were outdoor and I could power it with solar.

I think I'm going to just end up using a Foscam G4 WIFI (or maybe the 1080p version) and run the power.

A solar option is what I was hoping for to allow me to mount them where I'd planned - but I'll just have to figure something out.

Thanks for the advice.
 
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