[Release] Camect Connect

Hello, I'm also having issues getting this set up.
When I go to my Camect, the URL is https://home.camect.com/home/xxxxxxxxxxxxx/
If I try going to https://local.home.camect.com/ I get redirected to XXXXXXXX.l.home.camect.com, but it says that site can't be reached.
Did I do something wrong when setting up my Camect? Or have things changed?
Thanks for any help.

Works for me. The redirect will prompt for auth

I got a little bit farther using Safari, but I'ms till getting these errors:

app:19492021-01-20 01:44:42.693 pm errorjava.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot get property 'camera' on null object on line 198 (page2)
app:19492021-01-20 01:44:42.679 pm errorerror: java.net.UnknownHostException: XXXXX.l.home.camect.com: Temporary failure in name resolution [uri:https://XXXXX.l.home.camect.com:443, path:/api/ListCameras, headers:[Authorization:Basic XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX=], contentType:application/json, query:[:]]

Can you reboot your camect?

I've rebooted the Camect and Hubitat. Same results.
I'm thinking maybe I messed up by setting the admin password. But I tried using that, too.

If you can't reach local.home.camect.com from a browser, you probably need to either disable "DNS rebind protection" in your router, or, if possible make an exception for *.l.home.camect.com ... Basically, some dns resolvers are configured not to allow an external nameserver to resolve a name to an IP address that's internal to your network. You'd be turning off that restriction.

The camect user forum is linked off camect.com/welcome if you want to ask your camera questions there.

Regarding your poor nighttime detection results, submit some examples of missed alerts to see if there's anything that can be done to improve them. This assumes the images are good enough that a human would be able to recognize what's there without having any knowledge of context to help.

If you have multiple Camect units, you see them all at the top page after sign in. You can expand them inline to see cameras from all of them on one page, or you click into each unit if you want to visit just one. You'll have to configure which cameras are active on each Camect, of course.

One alternative to consider is running Camect in parallel with a "dumb" NVR that records at full resolution. You can use 1080p substreams from your cameras or from the NVR to feed to Camect (note: This requires manual configuration) and what you get will probably be fine for 95% of your needs, but you have the full resolution video available in the NVR in case you ever need it.

Thank you @innocent1, for the help!
I had to pull out my old Nighthawk router, but I finally got the Camect Connect app to work.

A little frustrating how the focus is on "pretty" and "cool looking" rather than functional even for things like routers. I've relegated the AmpliFi piece of $%@ to be just an AP now.
(Thanks for the gift anyway, kids.)
LOL

This looks really interesting, the AI detection is the major differentiating factor. Thanks for writing the Hubitat integration! I think I'm sold except I don't like the idea of a subscription. It sounds like it's not required, does the Hubitat integration work without the Camect Go subscription?

Yes. The subscription is just about providing access to your cameras off-network. They also haven’t started charging even though they said they would last year.

Thanks, you just sold two more of these for them as in addition to me, another Hubitat user I shared this with will buy one as well.

They really are good devices, and false positives are largely non-existent. The only issue I have is that sometimes it thinks things are different objects (it's a deer and it thinks that it is a dog). It's even good enough to see me moving in the house through my transom window from a camera outdoors and knows that there is a person moving.

@innocent1 is (Arup) one of the founders of the company, so I'm sure he can give you more insight into the subscription and any other questions you might have.

Thanks again.

That's really a small issue (identifying one animal as another) vs fighting the false positives of bugs, shadows, light changes on a partly cloudy day, weather, etc. I've purchased 3 commercial packages and ran them as VMs at home (Blue Iris, then Axxon, lastly DW Spectrum). Each was better than what I used before, but I really don't like spending all my free time tweaking just to try and avoid false positives and still looking at dozens of clips that don't contain anyone or anything.

The fact you made the Hubitat integration would open up so many additional possibilities (for when my C7 works, I'm tempted to return to the C5 for stability).

I stumbled across the product when I was looking at using a coral accelerator with a frigate docker container and saw a youtube video about it supporting the USB coral accelerator. Then google led me to your post. My only question left is could you connect more than one coral USB device to improve performance? That would be great to know you could scale it further.

I don’t think you can. I am looking for a Coral to augment my setup as well. I run on my own hardware (Lenovo m90n) and use their beta and should be able to support 40MP total. You can contact support@camect.com if you think you qualify for the beta.

@smj: In theory you can use more than one Coral accelerator, but it's quite unlikely that you would need to. How many cameras do you have, and at what resolutions are they?

@brianwilson: Have you shared a few videos of misdetections? I'd hope that we can fix them for you.

I have. Every time I submit a failure I get a response. Thanks!!

Only 5, a mixture of 4 Megapixel and 4k. I like the idea of using the software to run it on my own hardware, I have a J4125 that would give it just a little extra over the shipping hardware along with a Supermicro itx case/powersupply. I'd feel off paying only $20, I could buy an additional camera off your site as well. Is there any other way to help contribute to the project?

Thanks for your work on this driver @brianwilson ...I too just purchased a Camect based on your driver working with Hubitat and the fact that I can trigger automations depending on what is detected (person on driveway at night turn on lights etc.). My motion detectors have been hit or miss. I recently had my car broken into on my driveway that the motion detector didn't pick up at all but the camera's were rolling and this would have most likely been detected if I had the Camect. Luckily they opened my mailbox first that I have a contact sensor on...our google mini tts alerted my wife and she checked the camera's just in time to wake me up. I was able to scare them off before they ransacked the entire car. It was very satisfying seeing seeing them run all the way down our street :slight_smile: Thank you Hubitat!
Hopefully this will make my alerts that much better.


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@smj: The total resolution matters, so how many of them are 4k is critical if you'd plan to use them at full resolution. You may also be able to help matters a bit by turning down frame rates.

I don't think the J4125 will be hugely more capable than the J3455 we use ... i.e. the CPU is a little faster but the GPU specs look about the same. Coral will help and may suffice if you mainly care about gettting good alerts and triggering home automation. I'm not sure how it will do for live viewing performance though as video encoding/decoding capacity could still be an issue.

As far as contributing to the project. Don't do it by buying a camera from us... We put those on the site so that people who are putting together a new system from scratch have some concrete camera choices to work from w/o having to read through docs, but we don't make any money on them. We rather have you buy the same mode of camera from Amazon to save us the hassle of shipping them :slight_smile:

We do expect to have subscription enforcement live fairly soon, but of course I've been saying that for a while and it hasn't happened yet. Once that's online you can just buy a sub. Until then, don't worry about it. The best thing you can do for us if you like the product is to tell other people about it.

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While [obviously] I wish no one had messed with your car to begin with, how great that you were able to catch someone live in the act and scare them off! I started investing in cameras after having a "friend" steal & pawn some of my stuff -- I would love to bust someone live!