Battery Powered & Solar Charged Cameras?

[John Laurence Poole]

I may have an opportunity to place a camera on a neighbor's property to further monitor a troublesome alley problem.  So hard wiring using power over ethernet (PoE) probably is not an option unless I go buried cable and then have a cable running up the structure to a camera -- really unlikely since the neighbor is one lot away.

So I have been surveying what's available on Amazon for battery powered & solar recharged cameras and it seems all the cameras I have found either state that you can record to the camera's SD card (that's just silly) or you have to go through your wifi to reach their cloud.  No local access to the camera, say using an rtsp protocol.  It seems the industry is quite determined to place themselves in between the camera's output and your eyeballs and not let you capture the stream.  Perhaps they don't was it publicized what sacrifices they are making to stream on battery power.

So, does anyone know of a camera for outdoor use that 1) has wifi, 2) battery power & solar recharging, and 3) access via rtsp or some other protocol so you can have Moonfire access the camera's stream?  I'd sure like to know.

This development, plus the expense and additional circuitry needed for PoE, is making me wonder if I should be looking at a solution that involves batteries and solar charging with say a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W.  No doubt there will have to be sacrifices made in terms of the quality of the video feed, e.g. from 30 fps to maybe 10 and local camera intelligence to stream only events where motion has been detected.    There obviously are trade-offs between the PoE vs. battery and the industry selling these units appear to want to keep owners from direct access? 

I'll have to start doing some tests with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and determine what power it takes to do 1) capture, 2) analyze for motion, 3) send over wifi, & 4) recharge and battery capacity.

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John L. Poole

707-812-1323
jlpo...@gmail.com