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Anyone aware of IP wireless battery operated cameras with ONVIF support?

edited May 2018 in Cameras
I've seen the Arlo cameras and there's a newer one coming out (Evercam) with claimed 365 day battery life. For those of us with tough spaces to reach with network cabling and/or power, these seem to be a decent option. But, they are both relying on a closed system that uses internal camera storage or requires to pay for extended cloud access. Does anyone know of a similar wireless battery operated camera that has ONVIF support?

Comments

  • Not sure if it fits the bill but the reolink argus 2 can be powered with a small solar panel and their other cameras work with ss...
  • Netgear has a line of ONVIF wireless battery cameras. they use the same physical package as the Arlo cameras, but guts are different.

    There is a base station that is powered and connects to the cameras using a proprietary RF/wifi protocol. The base station does some kind of ONVIF handshaking so the cameras themselves are only on when they detect an event, but the host pulling the ONVIF stream things a plain ONVIF camera is connected.

    I never tested these cameras but the concept is intriguing.
  • Batteries simply don't have the energy required to practically power a camera that is continuously streaming. All the battery-powered cameras on the market stream in quick bursts, not continuously.

    As @Spiv mentioned, there is a Netgear product that comes closest to providing this functionality. It consists of a base station that streams continuously via ONVIF to an NVR (such as SecuritySpy), and a battery-powered camera with motion detection. When motion is detected, the camera streams. When motion isn't being detected, I presume the base station will be providing some dummy image to the NVR.
  • I think we are dancing around the real issue: ONVIF is a pretty limited spec. If I understand correctly, is really just provides a decent way to get the device capabilities (resolution, ptz ability, etc.) and the RTSP parameters in a way that is programmatic and easier than hardcoded specs for each camera.

    But ONVIF assumes a continuous vide stream so there is no understanding of streams that would be coming from a battery device and little or no support (?) for triggers such as camera/hardware based motion, sound, or other assists the cameras can now provide.

    Forget about object recognition, facial id, etc. that some cameras are adding. Unfortunately this means the full stream has to be pulled from the camera and then processing done later in either the NVR or cloud-based systems.

    Does anyone know if there is any effort in trying to bring ONVIF forward to add any of these capabilities?
  • ONVIF does include some of the things you mention (e.g. it has an Analytics Service Specification), however in our experience this isn't widely implemented by camera manufacturers, so we haven't seriously considered adding this to SecuritySpy yet.

    As far as I know there is no explicit ONVIF support/allowance for battery-powered devices that don't stream continuously. But Netgear's solution sounds ingenious and should work just fine.
  • Thank you everyone. I will look more into the Arlo. I appreciate all the help.
  • All cameras can be battery/solar powered. I've run a few that way. Here's a post I just made on another forum that might help...



    Don't overthink it, if you can figure out basic motorcycle electricity you got this. The camera voltage varies by brand and model. You need to match voltage of course, so choosing a 12v camera makes life easy since that's a standard. And since USB is 5v, that's easy to support also just with more parts. I have run a 12v camera from a motorcycle battery and a Harbor Freight solar panel (along with a directional radio to reach about 2 miles to the access point). How to make the physical connections is up to you; cut the existing cord, or use components or other matching connectors. Some cameras have a USB power input.

    Current has two components; how much is available at any given time (amps or watts), and how much is used over time (amp-hours or watt-hours). Camera current will vary by model, and whether it has IR illumination. My guess is the IR uses more power than the camera itself. Do you need it? How dark is that area? You may even need more than what is built into the camera.

    Basically you need to supply the camera with its ongoing need (easy, any battery really) and also with enough for the time it will be dark. For that you have see how much it uses, and multiply it by hours. Right now my switch says the M5014 is using 2.5 watts. So that means that to run a full 24 hours, a battery would have to supply 60 watt-hours. With a 12v battery that would be 5 amp-hours, which is half or a third of the typical capacity of a motorcycle battery. I'd recommend an alarm battery though, and a 12v 7aH battery is pretty standard and cheap (<$20).

    The panel needs to produce enough each day to run the camera for 24 hours. So basically you take your 24 hour consumption of 60wH, figure out how many hours of full sun you have, and do the math. If you have 8 hours of sun and need 60wH...

    60/8=7.5w panel

    As long as you have a solar regulator, the panel can be as big as you want* without any issues. If you don't have a regulator, then you will seriously shorten the life of the battery, and literally blow it up if the panel is too big.

    *I was put on a helicopter and sent to a mountain-top where equipment was randomly shutting down. The site is solar powered, and it was over voltage. The AZ sun is still brutal in winter, and cold panels are super efficient. So there we are on a super cold day with lots of sun, producing more than the regulators could handle. I plugged a room heater into a remote power switch, and wrote a script to turn it on when high voltage was detected. Done.

    Pics...the battery banks are to the right, and the dude looking left is staring at the regulators doing their thing...
  • Here’s what I was able to find from Netgear: https://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/VNC4030/VNC4030_Camera_QSG_EN.pdf

    But I don’t know how current this is. Frankly, it looks like first generation Arlo wire-free cameras. I’m pretty deep into Arlo at the moment, with 23 cameras currently online, and another three I need to install. But they are all two and three generations later than this. I have some second generation Arlo cameras that appear to use the same battery type as you see here, but I retired the last ones a few weeks ago. These newer Arlo cameras come with built-in batteries, so they’re a real pain to pull down the whole camera and swap it out, just so that you can recharge.

    I had been hoping to replace all my Arlo cameras with something better (paired with SecuritySpy), but this looks to me like a major step backward when it comes to wire-free cameras.
  • Ok I am jumping in pretty much where I don't belong...but. I am looking for a solar powered camera for alerting for motion. Streaming in not of much importance here. I need a self sufficient camera (PTZ would be nice but) Past cameras with POE or power feeds have all been stolen after their power was just ore stoped Any thoughts or directions??

  • Hi @johirsh you may be able to find a solar-powered camera that can send you notifications directly, but this forum is for discussing systems based around our macOS software SecuritySpy, and any camera that you want to use in SecuritySpy must be capable of continuous streaming of video so that SecuritySpy can do its work. So for this, you'd need to create your own solution along the lines of what @calvarez has described above.

  • edited December 2022

    I understand the dedication to Mac OS. although I ma having had a hard time with MAC OS since they have rendered 5 of my desktops obsolete in two year. I guess I have to go back to POE and feed the local black market. I really don't care about a bettar power camera I don' have to learn home electronics

    e

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