For a total startup cost of under $120 and a $12/month data plan, we can view live video from our RV in its remote storage location on a remotely-controlled pan/tilt camera, receive notifications when motion or sounds are detected, and have downloadable video clips automatically uploaded to cloud storage services. This allows us to confidently check on the RV from anywhere in the world.
When we decided to store our RV offsite at a remote covered storage facility, we wished for a way to check on the status of the RV for our own peace of mind without having to make the inconveniently long drive to the storage location.
The location had no available WiFi service, so we’d have to provide our own Internet data service connection. How expensive would that be? Searching for “cellular modem” plans results in $40-60/month plans - essentially smartphone data plans without a phone. That seemed unnecessarily expensive for a task I estimated would use very little bandwidth, checking for a few seconds every few days or so.
I considered the burgeoning market of “trail cameras,” which is marketed toward hunters and nature-lovers. Early versions of these required physically connecting the typically tree-mounted devices to a computer via cable or by removing removable flash media storage, and periodically changing a substantial number of batteries for several months of operation during which the devices are constantly monitoring for motion sensing.
Trail cameras are now available with photovoltaic solar panels and rechargeable battery packs, so that if they are placed in a location with moderate daylight exposure (not necessarily direct sun), they can run indefinitely without requiring physical attention. Most cameras incorporate built-in visible and non-visible (infrared) lighting for nighttime imaging.
The product space evolved to WiFi connectivity - which limits the placement of the camera units to within the typical maximum range of a couple of hundred feet from a WiFi access point. Subseqent advances now makes available a good-sized marketplace of trail cameras with built-in cellular modems, which use the same cellular data services as smartphones. This allows users to receive notifications, still images, and (short) videos remotely, often viewable directly from a smartphone app or web page. Many of these cellular trail cameras partner with businesses that sell data plans (as with many modern services, subscriptions is where the money is - a perpetual revenue stream and a business model that’s easy to explain to investors). These data plans have been created to be carrier agnostic: the trail cameras have the hardware and software to connect to the big cellular infrastructure providers: AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. If you can hit any cell tower, the trail camera and its data plan will probably work. Plans are appealingly low-cost, beginning as low as $5/month for a limited number of still images (from 100 to 1,000 per month) but no video, to approaching $20/mo for unlimited stills and dozens of videos. The trail cameras can be impressively inexpensive, costing $80 to $200 for solar-powered cellular models.
Through my research, I decided that trail cameras didn’t really do what I wanted. Or at least not the way that I wanted them to work. The expectation of a trail camera is that it will take a photo (some produce very impressive image quality) or a video clip if an animal (or any other thing that creates enough thermal signature to trigger the motion sensor) so that you can identify that something has passed by. I wanted to be able to see a LIVE video image of the RV to assess that it was in a safe state. I could make do with a few minute old still photos or video clips, but you’d have to wait until something either triggered the camera, or you’d have to have cameras periodically take a photo whether anything had happened or not. “No news is good news” doesn’t work if you don’t know if the camera is actually working or not, or the camera shot is blocked by an obstruction.
Some trail cameras feature “live video” features or “on demand” video, but this often means very short, low-quality, noisy video clips, as the data plan providers are trying to limit the bandwidth burden of these products. The “on demand” or “near live” features allow users to send a request to see the “live” camera, after which the user waits until the camera wakes up its radio from power-conserving idle to see if any requests have been made, after which the camera digitizes some footage, compresses it to use less data, then transmits it over the cellular network. Some number of seconds (or more) later, the user sees a few seconds of crunchy playback of what the camera recorded in the interval since the “live video” request was sent. If you’re trying to confidently establish if something undesirable is occurring at the camera location, this isn’t ideal.
Disenchanted with trail camera offerings, I revisited the idea of a cellular modem. I like using the Wyze line of security cameras and their services and software - I even had a spare camera in stock. Maybe it was possible to get a data plan that didn’t cost $40+/month.
After some research, I hit on a theoretical plan - which is what I’m successfully using today. Here are the parts:
I mounted the camera high in the center of the RV where it could observe the chassis cab, cab doors, side house door and right-side kitchen window - the most vulnerable portals to the interior. Anyone entering through those would have their image captured to the cloud before they realized a camera was in place. However, views out through the windows tend to be overexposed in daylight and the bright night illumination of the facility, as the camera is guessing to properly expose the interior of the RV which dominates the shot. I mounted the camera so that I can remotely pan and tilt it to see all the other parts of the interior and out through the left-side house window.
There’s no reason you couldn’t connect multiple cameras to the cellular modem, and I will eventually add more to allow us improved remote situational awareness in and around the RV. In many installations, it would be desirable to have a camera(s) positioned to view the RV from outside. For these applications, I might try to utilize a solar panel/battery power supply to power the camera. I’ve been using very inexpensive ($20-30 each) panels 24/7/365 for three years to power outdoor Blink WiFi cameras up to 100 feet from our home. These are combination solar panel and battery pack which collect and store enough power during daylight hours - even in the depths of winter - to run the cameras constantly. There are similar products available for some models of Wyze camera.
The setup works perfectly for our purposes. We can look at a live shot from the camera on our smartphones, automatically pan/tilt the camera at any or all of the preset angles we configured. I've got the "smart" detection configured to notify us and store a video clip if a person is detected (when I selected an option to react to all motion, I got recordings of every vehicle passing by the storage space, which I didn't need). In the camera configuration I chose, the camera attempts to set exposure for the interior of the RV which dominates the shots, so the views out the windows are overexposed. There's no manual exposure control on the Wyze Cam Pan v3, so the only solutions there would be to brighten the interior (which I'm not going to do) or change the shot so the view out the windows determines the camera's exposure setting. Just take this into consideration when setting up your camera angle(s).
As mentioned previously, the data usage has thus far been well within the 2GB cap of the $10 T-Mobile prepaid plan, so I'm very happy that worked as anticipated. Even adding cameras should have little to no affect upon our data consumption, since we stream the cameras one at a time, and unless something causes a huge increase in triggering uploaded video events (I've seen this happen when shadows from swaying trees fooled motion-sensors - but Wyze smart detection has gotten progressively better at filter out false triggers over the years), I don't expect the data burden of additional cameras to prompt a change of data plan.
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