Hi ... Nice to meet you. Do you already own Arlo Pros or are you considering them for the new location?
Either way, I'm assuming that you may be asking about Arlo Pro because the battery-operated aspect might be important to you. If so, it's important to bear in mind that battery-operated cameras won't work very well with a continuously-recording system like Camect because the batteries run down fast.
Conversely, every battery-operated system misses plenty of action -- it's easy to find stories on the web from people that had a breakin and found that their Arlos failed to record the footage they needed to see. I actually know one such person myself.
If your Arlos are powered, the Camect integration itself will work and get you the same feature set as with any other camera -- but because the video comes from Arlo, you still have a system that's dependent upon your internet and their cloud service to work properly.
If you have power available where you want your cameras and happen not to have bought Arlos already, I'd recommend getting regular wifi IP cameras instead. With Camect you get the same feature set and experience, but the cameras cost a lot less and don't depend on an internet service to work.
Lastly, in case it's of help, we have a camera compatibility FAQ at camect.com/camfaq that provides advice on many specific brands.
Thank you for the prompt response and yes I currently have Arlo Pro units, I rent and power is limited where I want to utilize the devices. I also do not like the necessity of Internet based so I am interested in moving away from the Arlo products but the battery/powered operation is a concern.
@innocent1 I bought in to the March order. Looking forward to playing with this and interface possibilities with HE.
The number one feature that interested me was the local smart motion detection. I don't want to know every single time a car drives by, lights flash, or a duck is on my doorstep, but I do want to know if a person is there and maybe ignore the UPS guy. There is no other product available which is promising the level of object detection Camect is claiming. Local algorithms mean this works without an Internet connection.
BI was my other consideration. But between building a PC with a Windows license and integrating 3rd party software to get the object detection (but not as effective - nor local), Camect seems to do the same thing better for only $299.
I have a Nest Hello but I'm assuming that Nest integration will eventually be busted (by Google). I'll be using this system to build a small IP Camera network.
The only down side seems to be that this was designed with 1080p camera in mind. If you have 4k stuff you can only run 3 cameras with it.
@ryley, If you talk nicely to the devs, they will let you use your own PC with a fast CPU and lots of Ram with their OS image (obviously, unsupported). That is what I plan to build after a bit more testing because I have 5 x 4K Hikvision Cams and the Nest stuff too.
That is an interesting option. The best for me would be a container or VM on a Qnap. I sincerely would pay a fair price for it, should it work decently.
Those are amazingly low processing specs which makes we wonder how on earth they're doing image analysis on potentially 12 cameras--very impressive if it works as well as it's reported to!
I took the leap too. If I need to re-host, it looks like that little box could be re-purposed and the hardware alone is probably $150-$200. I was looking at getting a NUC 8i5 to rehost my cameras anyway so I can try the Camect box for a while and if it's not fast enough . . .
I have less tech constraints, as I wouldn't exceed 4 cams. So the unit packed with the sw is still a good purchase.
BTW, the unit is similar to this. The overall price seems fair
Ive got my Camect all set up and working, first impressions are its pretty awesome. Object detection seem to be very accurate so far and everything runs much quicker having it all local.
I would love to work with someone who has more development skill than me to get the Camect API integrated into Hubitat.
Good to hear! Can you provide some info about your camera setup (number, resolution, type, ONVIF or RTSP, etc.)? I'm using SightHound with four 4MP ONVIF cameras on an Intel i7 box with 8 GB of RAM and it keeps the CPU utilization hovering at 60--65%. IIRC the Camect uses a small form factor Celeron which is pretty low power.
SightHound object detection works well enough during daylight hours but sucks at night, frequently identifying headlights and moths as people. I'd be very interested to know how well the Camect does with nighttime object detection.
