This isn't related to Thingino specifically, but I just started trying to find an outdoor camera to watch nightlife, and I have to say, it's been a painful experience. Literally all I want is to get a notification on my phone when an animal moves around in my large yard, and watch a recording of it on my phone soon after. And that, apparently, is very difficult.

The first problem I ran into what "what camera do I buy???" First I looked at trail cams, because those are made for this, right? Except, no, they almost all require a SIM card data plan. There are a few with wifi but they are all "mini hotspots", meaning you have to disconnect from your own wifi to connect to them, and maybe get nofications, and maybe you can stream live video, if they aren't buggy, and if the range reaches. So trail cams are out (and honestly that's fine because there's too many of them to look through as well)

So then I start looking at outdoor "security" cameras that can connect to my wifi, have some kind of app, motion detection, notifications, etc. Now I want to place this at the back of my yard where the animals come in, and there's no power there, so I think battery powered, right?

I spend 2 days doing research to finally buy a Reolink... only to find out 1) everyone says don't get Reolink (honestly it's not that bad), and 2) the motion detection is almost unusable, because all battery cameras only use a PIR sensor (to save battery), and their PIR sensors are not designed like the better trail-cam PIR sensors, so a wide-angle, long-range area won't detect motion (even if you can see the motion in live view). So your best bet for actually detecting motion is a plugged-in IP camera with an RTSP/ONVIF stream and some software to do pixel diffing (and then the "AI" (lol) feature of cropping away false-detection areas and shapes).

So now I'm packaging up the Reolink to return it, and looking at what cameras are cheap and have built-in pixel detection (if possible) or streaming to an NVR (which of course is another expense and thing for me to figure out how to build or buy). But there's still hundreds of different models of all kinds and price points to sift through. And of course there'll be the separate project of "how do I power the thing" (because I'd rather not spend even more on an outdoor-buried-compatible ethernet cable + POE adapter, plus the labor of digging below the frost line for hundreds of feet; but if I don't, i'll need to jury-rig up a spare battery and solar panel, and possibly wifi adapter if the camera doesn't have wifi).

It would be great if there were just a web page that asked me what I was trying to do and told me "buy this." The funny thing is, I've been using ChatGPT throughout this entire process and it failed to inform me of al this at the beginning, so clearly there's more tailored guides needed for people to pick the right thing.