An Alternative to Nest Cam

• May 21, 2017
• Adam Beguelin

No doubt about it, Nest Cam is easy to setup and use. But there are a number of drawbacks to using Nest Cam that might entice you to try an alternative like Sensr.net. Here are some reasons that you might want to try an alternative to Nest Cam.

• Can’t use your own camera
• Can’t mix and match camera models
• The service is expensive
• No APIs for accessing your footage
• Locked in to one vendor
• Limited video clips

If you’re interested in using Sensr.net as an alternative to using Nest Cam, give us a try. We have a free trial of course. Any you can use almost any camera with our service.

Ouvis ZV1 Camera Not Ready for Prime Time

• May 10, 2017
• Adam Beguelin

The Ouvis ZV1 camera is not ready for prime time. The only thing it’s good for is viewing the camera on your local network. You can’t view it remotely (no P2P viewing) and the FTP uploads don’t work so you can’t use it with Sensr.net.

The only thing good about this camera is that it’s pretty easy to setup. If you have the app, you can get the camera going pretty easily. You do need to plug it into an ethernet jack on the same network as your phone’s wifi, but once you do that, the Ouvis app can find the camera and configure it.

Google Wifi hack: Connecting to old static IPs

• April 21, 2017
• Adam Beguelin

Are you setting up a new Wifi router and have a bunch of devices with static IPs? When converting to the Gogle Wifi router, I discovered a cool hack to get to your devices with their old IP addresses even though the router is using a new subnet or IP range.

The Google Wifi is a cool way to blanket your home with wifi. Place multiple nodes around your home and the create a mesh network among the nodes. Each node has multiple ethernet jacks. Only the primary node needs to be plugged into your router. On the secondary nodes, the ethernet jacks allow you to connect ethernet devices to the network directly. Essentially the nodes act as if they are wired. You can plug a printer or camera or desktop computer into the nodes. One drawback to the Google Wifi is that you can’t connect them using a wired network. This is contrast to the competing eero system which allows the nodes to be connected via a wired network as well as using the mesh network.

What about those static IPs?

One of the challenges to using the Google Wifi is you need to convert all of your devices to the new network. In my case I was using the private subnet 10.1.1.x. If you’re using DCHP this isn’t a big deal, but in my case I had a bunch of cameras with fixed IP addreses like 10.1.1.60 so I could connect to them directly and also setup port forwarding for external access. My main reason for doing this was so I could easily connect to the cameras directly. If you use DHCP, the IP addresses of the cameras will change over time and if you want to connect to them, you need to rediscover the camera’s IP address, which can be a pain.