Budget wireless/solar security camera?

[Oldgreybeard]

We spent ages laying new topsoil to form a new verge along the base of the new stone wall we had built recently, sowing a mix of grasses and low growing native wildflowers. Unfortunately, the verge got wiped out over about half it's length, by a tractor that not only drove over it but which also bounced the side of its tyres against the wall, luckily doing no worse than leaving black scuff marks on the stone (the verge is a write off at that end, though).

I've been out today and made up some white plastic posts (bits of old BT duct painted white), screwed red and white reflectors to them and pushed them into the soil at the base of the wall in the hope they attract the eye of anyone tempted to do a bit of off-roading down the lane. Odd thing is that the old verge that was there when we just had fencing along there never once got damaged like this.

Anyway, a couple of years ago a neighbour had a fair chunk of their stone wall demolished by a tractor, and they never managed to find which of the local contractors was responsible. As building stone walls is not cheap (I could buy a reasonable car for what we've just paid for ours) I'd really like to find a way to identify anyone that does damage it. At the moment I've jury rigged a wildlife camera, tied it high up to a tree so it is looking along the wall. Not ideal, as the batteries only last for around a month and it will be a faff to keep getting the camera down to change the batteries. I had thought of just adding a solar panel and battery pack to the wildlife camera, as that has a 12V power socket, and that may yet still be an option.

What would be ideal would be a small, discreet, outdoor camera, that can be solar powered and which can send images via WiFi when it gets triggered. Doesn't need to have high quality video, when the police lady was around a week or so ago she felt that high quality still images were more useful than video for ID purposes. Looking along the lane like this doesn't view anyone else's house or land, so there are no real privacy issues (according to the police advice).

I'm after recommendations from anyone that may have used something like this. I definitely don't want something cloud connected, just the simplest possible set up that can run unattended for long periods. If it's small and discreet, so much the better, I can easily remotely mount a small solar panel, or even, perhaps, rig up a 12V power feed to the convenient tree where this could go.

If anyone knows of a cheap and simple off-the-shelf camera that might do the job then I'd be grateful to hear about any experiences, good or bad. Should add that there is no mobile signal here, so anything that uses a SIM card and connects that way won't work. WiFi is a bit iffy (triple glazing blocks WiFi very well) but I could probably fix that with another outdoor repeater (already have a couple set up to get WiFi to the garage).

[Thebeeman]

As a "cheap" easy start, have you considered a Trail camera? If you set it to stills it will hold a lot of photos on and SD card (as big as the camera will support) and you can exchange cards when required. We had one monitoring a barn owl box before we became rich and fitted a 100 mt wifi link and CCTV to avoid upsetting the birds when they decided to use the box.

[Oldgreybeard]

Thanks, as an interim solution this is what I've done, set a spare trail cam up on a tree looking along the wall. It works, but isn't ideal, although it has captured several near misses when trucks have driven over the verge and got within an inch or two of hitting the new wall.

I have some large rocks being delivered next week, that I'm going to place at intervals along the verge as an added deterrent to people driving over it. From what I've seen it's just carelessness by a few drivers, perhaps made more understandable because the edge of the lane and the edge of the verge aren't that distinguishable from each other. Before the verge was disturbed by building the wall the edge of the lane was a lot clearer, as the verge was covered with grass and other plants. Now it's basically mud, especially where it's been driven on, it's just not easy to see where the edge is any more.

[dlw]

Had a couple of wired Reolink cameras which were quite good, they do solar ones too and with a discount on Amazon at the moment

[SafetyThird]

Funny you should post this, but I watched this video only this morning

There's a few other videos out there worth watching but if there's any way to get a cable there, go wired but if not, there's something that might work. Could you run a cat 5/6 cable out there and do power over ethernet to run a camera? That's what I'm thinking of doing to have a camera in the chicken run at our place. Alternatively, several cameras run of 5v USB power so a leisure battery and a car lighter adapter would run one for longer than the internal battery might.

[Oldgreybeard]

Unfortunately, all of those cameras seem to be internet connected, so are inherently potentially insecure and dependent on services mostly provided via Chinese servers I suspect. Maybe I'm just a bit overly sensitive, but having been badly bitten when installing a highly recommended Hikvision CCTV system a couple of years ago, that I later discovered was sending loads of data to China all the time, I'm not inclined to trust any budget internet connected camera.

I fixed the Hikvision system by disconnecting the NVR from my network and running it standalone, and as the cameras are all wired and powered via PoE from the NVR this works OK, although I did have to play around a bit to stop the system complaining about not being able to send my data to China.

To get a wired camera to that area I'd need to dig a trench around 30m long and bury a run of outdoor Ethernet cable, which would cause a fair bit of disruption, as it would mean going across our paved drive. Although our WiFi signal barely makes it out of the house (the insulation in the walls seems to block the signal almost completely) I have managed to get WiFi down to the garage, around 35m away, by using a couple of Ubiquito Nanostations (excellent bits of kit for point-to-point connectivity). These are relatively inexpensive, and are PoE powered, so I could use a couple more to get WiFi to a camera, but would need to find a way to get power down there.

I could knock up a solar system to provide power for the camera and link at the remote end, but it would need to be pretty hefty, as the cameras tend to draw a lot of power at night, when the IR illuminators turn on. Ideally I'd like something that takes high res stills, rather than video, like a trailcam, but with the ability to be solar powered. One of the trailcams I have does have a 12V input, so could be run from a small solar panel and external battery, and so far that seems to be the best off-the-shelf option, although it lacks WiFi connectivity, or any way of remotely viewing images.

I've just received a couple of ESP32 CAM modules to play with (very cheap) and they look promising, as they use very little power when in sleep mode and can be triggered using a PIR sensor. These little modules also have an SD card slot, so can store images and video locally, as well as having WiFi connectivity. The limited playing around with one I've done hasn't given great image quality though, it seems the tiny camera module they come with isn't that great (not that surprising given the price). I might have a look to see if a commercial WiFi camera can be hacked to remove internet connectivity and be powered from a small solar battery unit. Not sure if this is possible, but there are smart people playing around with Home Assistant that have hacked other cloud connected gadgets to make them secure and only connect locally, so it seems possible.

[Mr Gus]

Try the archives here, OGB, ...just remembered I posted about a memory card solar unit bought in spring, 2 actually.

[SafetyThird]

OGB, yes the connection to China is something I'm working against, which is another reason I used HomeKit before I moved over to Home Assistant. Many of the cameras have an RSTP stream which can be accessed directly without needing to use cloud services. I've been looking into it this week as I'm looking at putting a camera in our chicken run which is within wifi range of the outdoor unifi access point on the corner of our house but there's no power down there.

Mind you, I have a duct from the barn with wire running to the electric fence that connects at the corner of our allotment and I'm considering running a length of SWA cable to put a 13A socket in the allotment to run a shredder and some other bits. If I do that, I'll put an outdoor rated network cable with it and could run POE from the switch in the barn which would solve all my issues.

Have you seen the Frigate NVR setup? integrates with Home Assistant and keeps everything local, they have a list of suggested cameras and there's people reporting on using cheap cameras with that which might be an option.

[Oldgreybeard]

Not seen the Frigate NVR before, thanks, I'll take a look. I've been playing around with HA and a camera that streams RTSP for a few days (the ESP-CAM module) and it works OK, limited really by the poor performance of the cheap ESP-CAM module. I'm undecided about the need for AI and motion detection, as the set up I had with our old, analogue, CCTV worked very well and I'd like to replicate that with better cameras.

Our old analogue system had a trigger input on the DVR that could initiate recording, so I made a battery operated (with a small solar panel) motion sensor (using a cheap PIR module) and had that send a remote trigger signal via an encoded 433MHz radio link. I made a receiver box that detected the trigger and just operated a small reed relay to activate the alarm recording trigger input on the DVR.

This worked extremely well, and made sure that the DVR only recorded events that mattered. The wired Hikvision NVR set up we have now records 24/7, and can be a PITA when you want to go back through the recordings to find a particular event. I've tried using the motion detection function, but that seems to be challenging to adjust, so I've turned it off. The main problem was that at night the cameras will pick up motion from insects flying close to the camera, they get lit up by the IR illuminators so appear as very bright moving objects. Try as I might I couldn't stop this from constantly triggering the motion sensing. My old PIR sensor was far better at only triggering when there was a real event.