In April 2024 (roughly 7 months ago), I installed a set of four Hiseeu Solar Powered Wireless Security Cameras. They're mostly mounted in semi-protected areas, under eaves, or protected from the wind by the wall they're mounted on. I placed the solar panels to catch most of the available sunlight - none of the panels get full Michigan sun.
Surprisingly, maybe, the cameras have pulled just enough solar power each day to stay topped off, with each camera's indicator showing a full battery even in the morning.
I didn't count on the fact that these cameras need to go into standby mode when there is no activity - that is, they don't record 24/7. This makes sense (and seems obvious) when you think about that little solar panel as the only thing keeping them charged. It turns out, this isn't a problem - there's only so much zero-activity driveway footage you can watch, anyway.
But, I wanted more. I wanted the cool facial recognition, and person identification, and package delivery notifications, I'd read about online. For that, I turned to ZoneMinder, because it's free, powerful, and also runs on a Linux server, which I happen to have already in play.
I spent way too much time trying to find the right rtsp uri's for my HiSeeu cameras, so they could be added to ZoneMinder. Ultimately, I figured out two things:
First, there's a setting in the eSeeCloud software (running locally on the cameras' gateway device) that turns on the "rtsp server".
Second, on that same settings page, it gives you an example url to use to access each camera via rtsp (the protocol that would let ZoneMinder connect to the camera). If only it could be that easy.
This part took more trial and error than I would have liked, and I couldn't find documentation that was very helpful.
My first clue was that the url on the screen was in the 192.168.10.x range, and I knew that range doesn't exist in my network.
Ultimately, here's how to build the rtsp links for this camera system:
rtsp://[admin_user]@[LAN IP of camera gateway]:80/ch[camera number]_[feed_number].264
- admin_user: the user you set up to log in to your cameras' gateway device. |
- LAN IP of camera gateway: your internal network IP address of the gateway (e.g. 192.168.1.74, or 10.0.0.24). This is the address you type in a browser (on your home network) to see the gateway's interface.
- camera number: the number assigned to the camera you want to access. The gateway assigns camera numbers as a zero-based array (so the first camera is '0', the third one is '2', etc.)
- feed_number: there are two feeds, '0', and '1'. Feed '0' is high resolution, 2560x1440. Feed '1' is low resolution, 800x400 (800x400 isn't exactly right, I can't remember it at this point.
So, a proper rtsp link to camera '0' might look like this:
rtsp://admin@192.168.1.87:80/ch0_0.264
The best way i found to test this was from any device on the network using VLC Player; just load that address as a stream and you're good to go.
Ultimately, this worked great. I was able to load up ZoneMinder with my four cameras and for about 24 hours, I had a pretty sweet setup. What I found, though, is that ZoneMinder's always-on connections to the cameras drained their little batteries to the bottom. They couldn't even absorb enough sunlight in the daytime to get charged back up.
When the cameras went dead, I went back to the EseeCloud application and shut ZoneMinder down. :-(