Home surveillance is getting easy and easy!!

It's been over a year since my last time to get the monitoring camera, It still works good, and my roommate and I is quite used to it. 

To know why we install the camera, please read my previous post: Our new home guardian, Push Video IP camera

Last Sunday my roommate's boyfriend brought another camera from the same company as our current one. He said the company contacted him again and hoped we could help them to write another post about their new IP camera, AVN701EZ, mostly about their new feature, EaZy Networking. 

And of course, we could get this camera for free as the reward. Yeah~

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Here's the camera box.

Here's the feature description about EaZy Networking. 

It seems I don't need to go over many steps and this camera is able to get online. Three steps!!! 

We'll find out whether it's true or not.

Description about EaZy Networking

And allow me to say again. This company really loves the style of putting everything on the box.  


Here's the content in the box. 

Basically the content looks similar as the one we are using, but this camera doesn't look like the camera picture printed on the box. We checked again, and found out that there's a small note asking you to check the product table on the bottom.

Inside the box

Here's the look of this camera after it's assembled.
Still simple and stylish.  I like it!

Camera

That's enough for the box.  Let's move on to the highlight today: EaZy Networking!

Here's the description for EaZy Networking. Oh my... doesn't look easy at all!  

Therefore, we girls threw all these reading to my roommate's boyfriend, who's responsible to check if we could use the so-called "EaZy Networking" to get this camera online, and tell us what's EaZy Networking and how to work.

It turns out that EaZy Networking is not a free service, but it will give us 500MB data for free at the beginning. My roommate's boyfriend said 500MB should be enough since we don't access the camera all the time. If 500MB is up, we could buy data from EagleEyes app.

As for the installation environment, a router or wireless router is required. I think this is more flexible than the camera we're using, requiring a wireless router only for easy setup from iPhone. After all, not everyone's house has a wireless network to use. But since we already have a wireless network built in our home, there is no big difference.

The network setup started. 

Plug the camera to power, and connect it to our wireless router, as said in the quick setup. Then, wait for the two LED lights to be on.

Open EagleEyes, and click "+".

EagleEyes is the mobile app used to set this camera. It could be downloaded from App Store.

Select "EaZy".

Select "Register" to create an account.

Set the account name and password.

Select the upper camera. 

The app will ask you to check your camera connection and the LED light status later. We went through these two steps very quickly since these two checkings were already done at the beginning.

Then, we continued to the MAC address page as follows:

Key in the mac address of the camera.
As said in this page, the mac address is on the sticker of the camera.

This page is a little bit different from the quick setup picture. "Network Type" is added, but we ignored it anyway. 

Enter a name for this camera.

Setup completed.

"my room" is added with a cloud on the camera picture.

"my home" is my current camera, and "my room" is the new camera just added. It seems the camera added by EaZy Networking will have a cloud icon on the camera picture.


We selected "my room" and see we can see the room.  It worked. We also switched the network mode to 3G, and tried the camera again. We can see "my room" without any problem.

My room

We recalled the experience to install our current camera, also with iPhone. I remembered we needed to write down many numbers and wait for the camera to processing.  

But this time I don't need to remember any number. All I need to do is to make sure the two LED lights are stably on, and enter the mac address. The whole process is just so quick and easy!! 


And you can check how much you've used for the free data, and buy data to use when the free data is up. We'll describe on my next post.

Our new home guardian, Push Video IP camera - Part II

And from the box and eagleeyes official website, we know that there’s a specific app for iPad, EagleEyesHD, and the video quality seems better than watching from iPhone.

We can see four cameras at the same time in EagleEyesHD. But since we only have one IP camera, we can’t know how it’ll be look like.

There’re some instructions on the website also about how to use this app.

Go to App Store and search EagleEyesHD to download.

In EagleEyesHD, the interface looks similar to EagleEyes.

Press “+” at the bottom as we did for iPhone,
key in the same information as in the iPhone,
click “Get Type”, and choose the resolution to “SXGA”.

Here’s the camera image on iPad.

Click the camera image, and it turns to full screen.
Good: The image really looks nice, and the icons below are the same as iPhone. 

We also try Push Video function.

This time, we wanted to know if we could still get the message when we turned off the light, and we adjusted the slow shutter to S4 to see more clearly. After all, thieves love nights better.

We received the message, but this time the video was slow and vague.

According to the explanation on the website, it’s because we raise the shutter level. However, if we don’t raise the shutter level, how can we recognize what’s inside the video? That’s the dilemma.


And as instructed on the website, we can also search the videos from this app, but it seems to be able to save the latest three videos the top. 

It’s not convenient if we want to find and give the video to other people, such as the police. Should we stop Push Video immediately when we see the important video in order to keep it?

it's cute~~

Our new home guardian, Push Video IP camera

After half a year in Taiwan, I want everyone to meet my new home guardian, Push Video IP camera. :)

A few days ago, my roommate’s boyfriend brought this camera to us and told us this camera was suitable for us to watch our home, and we could get this camera for free (approx. NTD 3,800) if we could write a post describing how we felt about this camera, before, during and after the installation, both good and bad. This event is held by its manufacturer. Cool!

I heard that I could use it to monitor my home and receive messages to see video on my iPhone or other smart phone if something happens, which might be what my roommate and I need now because we got robbed last month and we lost our money, cameras, and notebooks.

My roommate’s boyfriend called the police and found that the thief might enter from the window by breaking the iron window. Check below. How could it be possible from such a small hole! And we checked the CCTV cameras in our neighborhood but found nothing.

We also found the clothes and fingerprint of the thief (how dare he!!), but the police just couldn’t find any related criminal record related to the fingerprint.

If this camera is good, then it'll be a really good solution for us.

Anyway, three of us starts.

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Here’s the camera box.
Good: Looks simple and clear.

You can find the introduction of the camera main feature, Push Video, on the other side of the box.
Bad: There’re too many words. I don’t like it personally, but my roommate says it’s ok and clear.

It seems you need this app, EagleEyes, first to see camera images from
iPhone, iPad or Android phones. We’ll find out how later.

Let’s open the box and see what’s inside.

There’s a quick setup guide. This camera can do quick setup with iPhone and iPad?
We’re really interested.

Under the quick setup guide, you can see and camera itself and other accessories.

Here’s the whole package content:

The camera itself, one camera bracket, one network cable,
one adapter, one CD, and one green accessory.

Here’s the front view of the camera.
Good: It’s quite small and light, and we all like the white cube design.

Here’s the backside of the camera. You can see the network port and power jack.
As for the green port, we tried the green accessory in the box and they fit!
Will check the guide and see if there’s any explanation for it.

Here’s the quick setup guide of the camera, describing how to connect this camera to Internet
with iPhone and iPad.

My roommate’s boyfriend checked the content and said it’s ok to follow the instructions because we have set up a wifi network in our home.

He also said if we didn’t have a wifi network, we would have to download the complete instructions from www.surveillance-download.com/user/n801.swf as the quick setup guide said.

“Complete instructions?” Sound hard. Hope we can successfully finish the setup with iPhone.

Here’s the website for downloading the complete instructions.
There are two more manuals for this IP camera besides the quick setup guide, and there are some explanations telling us when we need each manual.

We followed the quick setup guide to install the camera in my living room, and connect it to
power and the wifi router. There’s simple connection illustration in the quick setup guide.

Download and install EagleEyes-lite (free) to my iPhone.

Click “+”.

Slide down the page and click “Local Network Search”.

Click the IP address shown.

And as instructed in the quick setup guide, we slid down the page and
pressed “Apply” to wait for the setup message.

Good: So far the steps are quite simple.

Bad: We waited quite a time for the setup message to show. 

The status stayed “processing” really quite long enough for us to think the app was down.

Finally we got the message “done”, and returned to the setting page automatically.

We entered “living room” as the title of the camera, and clicked “Save”.

At this moment, we noticed the two blue lights were on, which means the quick setup is completed according to the quick setup guide.

Really done? Less than 5 minutes?

There’s a section in the quick setup guide telling us how to examine our setup. We followed the steps to switch our network mode to 3G, and tried to see our camera image.

Here’s the camera image. It worked.

And according to the guide, if we’re successful in 3G, we’re done for the whole setup.

Good: 

Really finish all setup less than 5 minutes.

Bad:

We wanted to know the meaning of each icon below, but there’s no explanation in the quick setup guide. However, there’s a note saying to visit www.eagleeyescctv.com/Demo_2.aspx (eagleeyes’s official website) for eagleeyes operation.

Why not telling us how they work in the quick setup guide directly?

But anyway, we visited the website and found the icon explanation. And we know we could press the “+” icon (slow shutter) below to see things in the dark.

Here’s the camera image when the light is off. Really dark.

My roommate’s boyfriend stands in the middle of the camera.

Here’s the camera image each time after I click it.
It’s really getting lighter each time, and I can click it 5 times in total.

Good:

We can see things in the dark as the level is going up.

Bad:

As the video getting lighter, any movement in the video getting slower.

It seems we can’t get both fluent and clear video in this camera. Maybe we should set a mini light in the living room to compensate this, and then we don’t have to adjust the shutter level.

Now it’s time to try how Push Video works and how it’s gonna tell us something happens in my living room.

I activated this function, and returned to my iPhone desktop.

At the beginning, this function didn’t work quite smoothly.

Sometimes it worked, but sometimes we received an error message, “download failed”.

Later, we changed the mode to 3G and try again. It worked very well every time.

When we were in 3G, the message showed really in 5 seconds (in fact 2 seconds in my situation) after we walked in front of the camera. However, the same promptness didn’t show when we switched to wifi.

My roommate’s boyfriend says it’s probably related to the network bandwidth. As you can see from the picture below, our wifi signal is not strong.

Good:

Very prompt when it detects something.

Bad:

The promptness is limited to the fluency of the network.

So far the using experiences are not bad. Finishing all network setup in 5 seconds from iPhone is really convenient and very impressive since we girls do not know much about network setup. Push Video itself is what we need the most now because we can know what’s happening at home if any, and we can call the police immediately to catch the thief.

What bothers us is the lack of information about the app, EagleEyes, itself. There’s not much information about how to use EagleEyes in the package. We need to go to its official website to see the explanation of each function icon. The app interface itself is quite simple in fact, but we still hope we can know how to use this app with a document in hand.

And from the box and eagleeyes official website, we know that there’s a specific app for iPad, EagleEyesHD, and the video quality seems better than watching from iPhone.

We’ll talk about this it in my next article.