Surveillance Upgrades

I’ve had a Wyze cam monitoring my front door area for the last couple of years. It mostly works, but occasionally glitches and drops a few seconds of frames in some recorded videos. Not that big a deal. The notification part is fast, but little too sensitive; I get a ping on my phone a second or two after its tripped, but I get a lot of pings for stuff like birds flying through the scene, or lightning.

I recently put another Wyze cam in the window in the garage for an additional view. I don’t think it was gonna be a keeper, glare from a nearby street light at night pretty much blows out anything interesting in the rest of the frame.

Last week I got notice that my Wyze subscription was coming up and that the rate was going to double. Hmm, just eat it and keep on trucking? or, look for something else?

Took a quick look on Wirecutter for security cameras. Hmm, that TP-Link Tapo C120 gets good reviews and is dirt cheap. A little more research and I found that you can get it to store footage on a local Synology NAS and skip the subscription for cloud storage. No monthly fee and less worry about my footage going AWOL or fed into some AI because I missed opting out of some weird feature? Sounds like a lifestyle improvement.

So, I bought one and replace the front door camera. Setup process was pretty smooth (better than I remember for Wyze, but those cameras were over 5 years old.) Plug it in, change phone to use network on the camera, and app walks you through setting up wifi and some basic options. The camera itself does all the detection stuff like people and vehicles. With a few days of experience, it seems at least as good as Wyze, but with less false alerts.

Getting the local recording set up on the NAS was mostly straightforward. In the Tapo app, you turn on credentials for the camera. On the NAS, you install Surveillance Station app. Adding the camera is pretty easy. Autoinstall couldn’t find it, but entering IP and credentials manually was no big deal. The only part I couldn’t find details on was what port to use on the camera. A chat with Gemini said that you need to use port 2020 (which uses the ONVIF protocol.)

The camera is 2K resolution. If you record at full resolution, that like 20Gb of data per day. I think I can get by just fine with saving 1080p and save some space. The full resolution file is stored on a 32Gb microsd card on the camera, so if I need the best quality, I’ve only got like 30 hours to fetch it through the Tapo app. The lower quality NAS copy will hang around for a few more days. When I get around to investing in new and bigger drives for the NAS, I’ll probably start recording the full 2K resolution again.

In for a penny, in for a pound. I got another camera for the garage area. Technically, the C120 camera is indoor/outdoor though Wirecutter said they didn’t have good luck with using their camera outside. This time around, I mounted the camera outside, just above a garage door; it wasn’t too hard to snake the power cable in the seam between the top of the door and the nearby molding and there’s a foot of over hang to protect the camera from weather. So, hopefully it’ll be ok. Adding the second camera to NAS was a breeze after getting the first one dialed in.

So, $75 out of pocket and a few hours of messing around and I’ve now got 2 cameras that record locally and no more ongoing fee for cloud storage. Nice.

Update: I just looked at cameras after dark. Crisp full color with just our normal outdoor lights. Cool! The older Wyze cam could only manage grainy black and white after dark.