Webcams, how not to buy them, but I’m stupid and learning
Because I have holiday now due to chrismas and I posted nothing in the last month, I decided to make a comment about how I chose my webcams – and it’s not a guide or an advice. It’s rather more a funny story.
I wanted to see the birds on my feeder. So I decided to buy some webcams. Cheap, with network access.
Step 1: ESP32 webcam
I bought some webcams based on ESP32, which is able to connect to my WLAN. Sounds good, bought three of them. Installed an USB hub and 5m USB cables to support them with power.
But there was a problem very soon. The connection from the webcams to my WLAN wasn’t good, so I replaced it with three WLAN mesh routers (Huawei WIFI AX3). The network quality did not increase so much. Next step was to use external antennas with the ESP32 webcams. To do this, a little bridge is to solder on the PCB board. In 603 circuit format. I’m too old for this sh*t, so I messed up one of the ESP32 cams, it was broken. I configured one of my servers to record the stream via ffmpeg32. Works… okayish. But not really usable outdoors.
Step 2: more ESP32 webcam
There were some offers with ESP32 webcams and external antennas. But when I read the comments about these, they said „yes, antenna included, but not with the soldered bridge to use it, have to make it by myself“. So no gain. Finally I found a guy on ebay who offers ESP32 with external antennas and soldered bridge. Doubled the price, but worth great. I bought four of them. Fairly good WLAN connection.
Step 3: The rats are coming… nightsight and better images
Now, there is the bird feeder, the webcams and recording the stream. But then, some new guests are showing up.
Rats. From where are they coming? How often? I needed answers to take action against them, because I don’t want to contribute to a rat problem in our neighborhood.
The ESP32 webcams can only make shots at daytime (and not very good). I needed something to monitor the night. Next step was to buy some webcams with nightsight. I chose 2 x Denver WCT6000 WLAN (but it seems not to be an actual webcam anymore, now it’s maybe the WCT8026W). Yeah, installed… but… they are running on batteries (change 8 x AA batteries every 3-4 days), the SD-card (32 GB) was enough to record about 2 days and – most important – the WLAN wasn’t really a WLAN. You can connect an app to the webcam via instant-WLAN, but you can’t connect the webcams WITH the WLAN.
On the plus side: The wildlife camera has (aside nightsight) a pretty good image resolution, the stream has a higher framerate (>20 frames per second, the ESP32 had 6 frames per second) and I could it use outdoors.
But nevertheless, I placed the cams at serveral locations and could track the rats and what they are doing when. So I could perform some optimizations with the placement of the birdfeeder, but there was no real solution. Even the city (or the neighbor where the rats are coming from) wouldn’t do anything.
After all, the wildlife camera was nice, but not a real solution.
Step 4: Reolink 510D webcam
On the road to perfection, the next step was to combine all my knowledge. I need nightsight, outdoor, high resolution, high fps rate and additionally I don’t want this WLAN connection anymore. Too much disconnects, not stable. Wires are the way to go!
I shifted to webcams from Reolink and I decided to take six of Reolink 510D. Great decision. I removed the USB-Hub with the USB-cables and replaced it with a POE switch, connected to my LAN. Now, I could remove the mesh WLAN routers. Finally, I build a camera pole on my terrace for the webcams and printed three connectors for the Reolink to attached the flat end to the round pole.
I installed datarhei streamer on my webserver, so I could see the result via internet (and VLC connected directly).
Step 5: webcam Reolink RLC810wa
Just a few month later, I switched the webcams to 4 x Reolink RLC810wa. I would say, there is a real reason about it. It has increased nightsight (up to 15m instead of 2m), it has a higher resolution (which I don’t need, I have to reduce the resolution because of the bandwith). Yeah.
They are black. That was the reason.
I’m some kind of happy at the moment.
webcam conclusion
The sequence of buying one thing after another may be some kind of logic. But the real step is, that you learn with every new iteration new problem, you have to solve, but you didn’t thought about them. So I upgraded from cheap to a fairly high level of money, which left a lot of hardware behind me. I paid too much at the end – regarding the now outdated hardware.
Most important, that nobody in my peer group could talk about this to me in detail. They had no knowledge about this, even if they have webcams for their bird feeder or other use cases.
But one of my kinks is „privacy“.
There are too many webcams out in the world, which NEEDS a connection to the manufacturers server, look at „Ring“ e.g. I had a Ring doorbell and I was yelling about the question „share your ring webcam with your neighbors“. To this point, I was willing to set it up for my use, but thinking about THIS quesiton alone, I was healed from all f*cking company app bindings and so on.
So I needed webcams. which can exists in my personally controlled realm and networks and have no dependencies on the outer world, escpecially companies.
Nah… merry chrismas and a happy new year 2025.