Hi,
I’m living far away from my parents house and they’re really old. I have a caregiver with them most of the day but I’d like to have a camera to check how they are when they are alone. Unfortunately there are few restrictions:
- It must be a wifi camera as they only have a small wifi router with no ethernet ports
- It must stream data only when phone/app is connected. The internet connection they have at home is limited to 10GB/month meaning that I don’t want a camera that continuously streams data to a cloud service.
Does a camera like this exist? any brand you would recomend?
Thank you!
But will this camera have access to power or does it have to be battery powered?
I won’t recommend a specific camera model, but I can suggest a general solution. Connect the camera’s power supply to a smart socket that will be connected to the Internet/cloud all the time via Wi-Fi. When you need to activate the camera, you turn on the socket and wait a few moments for the camera to start up, which, if configured correctly, will start transmitting…
Now the question is how do you want to watch this broadcast, stream to the cloud? Or somehow different?
How complicated can this solution be in general? If it’s supposed to be as simple and ready as possible, maybe something from Sonoff…
WiFi camera + socket + eWeLink Advanced Plan ($10/year). This way you can remotely turn on/off the camera’s power, which means it will 100% not generate network traffic. When the camera is turned on, you will be able to view it in the ewelink app (Android/ios) or via a web browser.
Eufy Pan & Tilt with a big SD-card for storage. You can also use a local SMB server. You can live view via the app, set it to record at given times or when it sees a person or movement.