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  • Author Author: ralphjy
  • Date Created: Date Created
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Bad Squirrel

ralphjy

It's officially spring and like a good Oregonian, my wife has been planting some seeds to get starts for summer vegetables.  We've finally gotten a stretch of sunny days in the 70s (F) , so she put her seed pots on the front step to get the morning sun.  Yesterday she noticed that the dirt in the pots was disturbed and the seeds were missing.  She suspected that the local squirrels might have done it and I was surprised when she put out new seeds this morning without adding any protection..

 

While we were out walking the granddog (only 5 1/2 miles today), I got an alert from my doorbell camera.  I didn't see anything amiss on my phone, but I checked a full resolution picture when we got home and something caught my eye.  I've marked it in the image below.

image

 

I checked playback around that time on the NVR and it indeed was a squirrel!

 

 

We live in a medium density suburban neighborhood, but we have a fair number of animals because of the numerous greenspaces.  I've had mice, rats, rabbits, raccoons, and a large assortment of squirrels and birds in my yard.  And we've had coyotes and deer roaming the streets.  Last year we had a problem with tomatoes and cucumbers being eaten in our garden and one day we were surprised to see a squirrel eating a cucumber!  Of course we didn't get any photo evidence, so no one believed us.  The only picture I got was of the cucumber, but I didn't have dental records to incriminate the squirrel image.

image

 

My wife is happy that we have video evidence this time.  And it reminded me that I wanted to reprint the mounting plate on the doorbell camera to move the view to the left and down a bit.

Parents

  • Haha that is so brilliant image

     

    In the past I've used "game" cameras to check on the outdoor critters, but your way is much better, with instant alerts!!

     

    How well does your doorbell camera deal with random other motion things like trees and shadows?

  • in reply to ntewinkel

    I do get false detections - primarily when it is bright with distinct shadows and wind that causes movement of the trees.  I guess you have had a similar experience.  I had wanted to get a doorbell camera with PIR for detection rather than just using image data, but they were just becoming available when I bought this.  I did restrict the detection zone and that helps.  It does work well enough that it's not too hard to scan through the motion detect markers on the NVR.

  • in reply to ralphjy

      wrote:

    > I do get false detections ... I guess you have had a similar experience.

     

    Yes, I bought a little pan/tilt camera by Inqmega a few years ago, and it is FAR too sensitive. I was hoping they'd eventually provide updates to allow tuning of sensitivity, but haven't seen that yet.

    I find it's only really useful when used indoors, because outside even a fly or a leaf will set it off. Indoors, a spider walking anywhere within view sets it off too.

    One of the features is that it will track motion automatically, but again - a leaf or branch will take its attention away from where it should be looking!

     

    I used it as a bird-nest cam last year to be able to see the nest built and the babies growing etc, and it works well for that.

     

    Ideally I would want one that doesn't require a cloud subscription, as so many companies now force on us.

Comment
  • in reply to ralphjy

      wrote:

    > I do get false detections ... I guess you have had a similar experience.

     

    Yes, I bought a little pan/tilt camera by Inqmega a few years ago, and it is FAR too sensitive. I was hoping they'd eventually provide updates to allow tuning of sensitivity, but haven't seen that yet.

    I find it's only really useful when used indoors, because outside even a fly or a leaf will set it off. Indoors, a spider walking anywhere within view sets it off too.

    One of the features is that it will track motion automatically, but again - a leaf or branch will take its attention away from where it should be looking!

     

    I used it as a bird-nest cam last year to be able to see the nest built and the babies growing etc, and it works well for that.

     

    Ideally I would want one that doesn't require a cloud subscription, as so many companies now force on us.

Children
  • in reply to ntewinkel

    I don't like cloud subscriptions either and I hate the latency.  I use an NVR and keep all my camera data locally.  The only bad thing about the 8 channel Amcrest NVR that I have is that it exports video in a DAV format which I have to convert to AVI or MP4 anytime I want to use it.

     

    IP cameras used to always have a web API (embedded webserver), but they seem to all be moving away from providing access - especially the manufacturers that are pushing cloud storage.  The key is finding an ONVIF compliant camera so that you can always access the video stream.  Unfortunately, there are varying levels of compliance image.