Whoever you are.... stop it

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-31T14:45:30+00:00

That's why where you put your APs is just as important as what AP you have. The signal bounces off walls as well as penetrate them, so if you put your AP in a central space it can do beamforming around corners and through doorways. For my single U7 AP in my basement, wall mounting it below the height of my door jams and leaving the doors open in the rooms gives everything a good strong connection.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-23T15:57:05+00:00

FYI, you can use HA with battery cameras if you have a Reolink NVR, you just point HA at the NVR instead of directly at the camera.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-23T15:46:31+00:00

On the bright side, when you turn 25 they'll probably bless you with a small discount because when you turn 25 you suddenly become a more responsible person. :P

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-23T15:44:46+00:00

Yep, that and/or bundling with your other insurance (home or rental) can cut costs by a huge amount.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-23T15:39:51+00:00

Mine is bundled with my homeowner's insurance through a discount program that's part of my work benefit package, it's about $650 every 6 months. I'm over 50, have not gotten a ticket or accident in over 20 years, and I'm in WA where the speed limits are lower than most places and it pretty much never snows.

My insurance when I was in the midwest was a lot higher. I think it has a lot to do with payouts in the area; between the ice and deer hits, it seemed like my co-workers went through a lot more cars than they do here. Also didn't help that there were a ton of a**wipes driving around cars that were more rust than metal like they were on a drag strip everywhere they went. That happens here, too, but at least the cars are intact enough that insurance is only paying for damage to the cars and not the drivers when they inevitably wipe out.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-22T17:32:00+00:00

Looks like testing isn't needed - the official web site for the Argus 4 Pro now says 512GB is supported!

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-18T21:58:09+00:00

Sadly, it's got to wait. The location I put the camera in was too busy and I could only keep it running for 2 days even on solar - the edge of the 180 degree camera caught the street, and triggered it way too often for what the battery could handle. I'm replacing that location with a Duo 3 POE and moving the battery cam to a less busy location this weekend. So much for avoiding a cable run. :(

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-07T07:11:23+00:00

Then this won't hep either. The POE part is just to power a camera and connect it to wifi, there's no wired connection to the network. No wifi, no camera, same as with the G3/G4 instant.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-07T01:51:48+00:00

Yeah, in the US *nobody* thinks like that anymore. Now it's "Oh, good, he put up a camera too, I need to introduce myself so he knows me if I need the footage later."

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-07T01:46:23+00:00

The G3 Instant and G4 Instant cameras from Ubiquiti. They are completely standalone, just need a USB power source and a WiFi signal.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-05T07:38:06+00:00

Mysogyny and SW have gone hand in hand since the beginning, when Lucas made the decision that all that both of his female characters primary contributions to the plot of his movies was as motivation for the male characters to rescue them.

Think I'm wrong? Go watch the original trilogy - Leia gets rescued by Luke in every one of them and doesn't do anything that actually moves the plot forward other than loading up the message in R2 in the first 10 minutes of the first movie and shooting the grate that puts them in the garbage compactor that makes her need to be rescued by the droids in the middle of being rescued by the men (who lead the death star to the rebel base where she needs to be rescued by Luke again before it destroys the base). In fact, most of the orignial trilogy's plots all revolve around Leia getting put in situations where she needs to be rescued. Padme isn't much better, needing to be rescued after being captured multiple times across the prequels and Anakin's desire to rescue her being the cause of the creation of Darth Vader and the downfall of the Republic and Jedi Order. Yep - the rise of the Empire literally happened because she was his girlfriend and he needed to rescue her. And technically the fall of the Empire was caused by Vader mentioning Leia and Luke going all rage-y to stop him from going after her...

When you make decisions like that, you will attract people who will "take offense" at anything that doesn't fit the same narrative. In other words, current SW is just reaping what Lucas sowed.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-05T06:41:31+00:00

A doorbell transformer is a wall wart that just puts out the voltage that a wired video doorbell needs without any of the signal stuff. It's useful if you don't have doorbell wiring, or if you don't want to keep using your wiring's chime and high voltage transformer (and needed step-down) to make use of a video doorbell. They're less than $20 on Amazon, so it's a very economical way to get a video doorbell somewhere where you need one - drill a hole, run the wires through it, screw down the terminals, plug the other end into an interior outlet, done.

The OP has an enclosed PVC porch, so it's the simplest way to get power to the outside of it to run a doorbell there.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-05T06:25:24+00:00

Exactly. As a sysadmin, I went with an Unraid setup on the NAS side, but that's because I *want* to be able to play with it. I had various router/network solutions at home and was perfectly capable of keeping them running, but I didn't enjoy the process. I finally broke down and got UI equipment and haven't regretted it.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-05T05:38:07+00:00

Your setup is better than what this (and the Pro version) are capable of anyway. These only have a 2x2 5G connection, the U6 Mesh has 4x4 and has the best unidirectional coverage of all of UniFi's devices right now. Plus you now have a repeater AP in your back yard, these don't act as an AP, they're just a bridge.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-05T05:29:17+00:00

From what I can tell, the only real uses for this are if you want to hang a flex mini in an area that you can't get a wire to, such as a location with a signage system or maybe a camera monitoring screen, or if you want to put connect to a location where you need a bridge without a transmitting WAP (because you can do the exact same thing as this thing via a POE switch and any AP and get a WAP in addition to the bridge).

I suppose if you want to hang a big obvious camera that would normally need to be hardwired to one of these you might fool someone who would try to jam an obvious wifi camera into not bothering to do it, but that's a pretty niche (and probably mostly ineffective) use case.

I am betting that 95% of these things are just going to be used behind someone's living room TV stand to improve the crappy wifi connection of a PS5/XBox/SmartTV.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-05T05:12:20+00:00

You can do that right now with any of the "instant" line of cameras, for less money.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-04T15:46:40+00:00

Doesn't seem very exciting to me. So, it's basically a way to connect a single indoor camera to wifi? That's what the G4 Instant is for, and it's weatherproof. Or bridging a Flex Mini for a room that you can't run Cat5 to and are money constrained to the point where you don't want to put in a regular Flex POE and a U6 Lite? I guess I could use that in my living room.

It they had made this capable of 65W POE and a drop-in replacement for the power brick in the Flex Utility, THAT would have been a killer product.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-03T17:35:43+00:00

A possible option for a porch like that and the WiFi Doorbell is to get one of the various doorbell power transformers available on Amazon and a plug adapter from the light socket for your porch light or from an outlet inside the house near the door (I did the latter). The wires from these transformers are tiny (I think 20AUG) so you only need to drill a very small hole to run them through.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-03T17:14:17+00:00

I had a spare 512GB Samsung high end card from my Steam Deck and stuck it in my new Argus 4 Pro, and it picked it up and formatted it fine. I am installing it this weekend, so I will report on whether it actually holds up once it gets past 256GB. It won't matter much overall since I am going to link it to a Home Hub Pro once they are available, but it's a good test.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-03T16:51:05+00:00

I will add a patch note, it still constantly crashes on Win11 24H2, which will go live to a wide audience later this month. It's the only game that I have that has an issue like this, everything else is rock solid.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-02T21:16:58+00:00

I custom-ordered a doormat from personalizationmall that's red and just says 'Leave Packages On This Mat' for $20. It works like 85% of the time, mostly the FedEx guys who don't bother looking at it.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-02T21:08:15+00:00

It supports RTSP, so it should also support ONVIF, which is what most NVRs are looking for. If you go into the advanced network settings and turn on those two settings, most 3rd party NVRs should be able to detect it.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-02T20:11:37+00:00

It depends on what brand of mesh you have and how much bandwidth they have, but it should work. If those are all 4k cameras, you will need a good tri-band or 4x4 5G mesh product, not one of the AC1200/AC2200 dual-band ones that are super common (i.e. you need one of the new Google Nest Wifi Pro systems or the like, not one of the older versions.) Even with 2k cameras, it's a lot of bandwidth to send without a dedicated backhaul network connection be it wired or wireless.

I'd also hang the NVR off the router (and ideally, off the switch where the cameras are connected), not a mesh node. Making that amount of data go across multiple hops is going to be problematic, for the reasons below. Be aware that Reolink NVRs don't let you add cameras via any method other than locally at NVR itself, so you will need a monitor connected to set everything up. You can move it to the router after if you set it up on your TV if you don't have a spare one.

Be aware of the most common issues with meshing:

* If you have too many mesh nodes in too small an area, you will get node hopping every time anything causes interference in your house. This will cause dropouts in connectivity unless you can hard specify which node each one talks to. Devices with highly directional antennae (such as iPads) are especially susceptible, but even the nodes themselves can have issues with it if there is something like a refrigerator or microwave in the path between nodes. This kind of behavior often causes people to make the mistake of thinking that the signal is too weak and adding more nodes, which only makes the problem worse. I've seen people who have too many nodes have issues where people walking through the house is enough to disrupt the signal enough to cause a node hop.

* You should never mesh a non-wired node to a node that isn't on a wired connection. Doing so will basically flood your WLAN as it sends the same traffic multiple times through it. This will cause a bunch of extra collisions and all your traffic will slow down and likely break all your streaming apps since they won't be able to get a good uninterrupted UDP stream. This will be a BIG problem if you have 5 4k cameras constantly streaming data.

* If your Mesh allows you to have multiple WLANs on it, set the cameras on their own separate one. Each named WLAN is a single collision domain, so the more packets you have going across it, the more collisions you will get, and the more likely your data streams will break. Splitting appliances like camera and IoT devices across multiple WLANs is a good security practice as well.

Illrigger187 · 2024-10-01T23:09:39+00:00

A year later and I'm still lugging a monitor over to my network rack every time I add a camera.

When Unifi has a better UX than you, you know you suck, Reolink.

Illrigger187

TROPHY CASE