We all live in homes and we all want secure homes. But with doors, windows and grills, one can only do so much to protect their own home. Let’s face the facts, break-ins happen all over the world though it doesn’t hurt to have some sort of surveillance system around your compound.
Meet the Netatmo Presence, a smart outdoor security camera released at CES 2016.
Wait, another “smart” home-monitoring system that has a motion detector? Well yeah but this one can identify the differences between a person, animal and car.
The brand isn’t a stranger to the home-monitoring scene; before launching Presence, the “Welcome” indoor camera had this revolutionary facial recognition technology – letting you always put a name to known faces. Presence doesn’t go as far but the ability to distinguish a person, animal and car is already a feat in itself.
Connecting to your home Wi-Fi network to send you real-time push notifications of what it has been seeing, it’ll buzz you on your designated device if it notices a person moving around the vicinity, an animal running about or a car pulling up to the driveway – proceeding to show you a video recap of it happening.
Able to detect people/animals/cars up to 20 metres, the camera also allows users to pinch-to-zoom to ensure you manage to identify the culprits in your video recording. It’ll be interesting to see how capable the software is and if any costumes/hoods or etc can fool it into not “recognising” a person.
Having Presence on your porch will definitely help when you’re expecting a valuable package; keep an eye on gardeners and handymen; or when you’re too preoccupied to notice the doorbell going off. It makes perfect sense since we’re always on our smartphones anyways, the push notification should be seen quickly.
As a fixed outdoor camera, it’ll obviously be working during the night-time but once the sun goes down, the camera kicks into infra-red mode – if you want it to – otherwise the floodlight that sits above the lens will be mighty useful.
Personalise Presence and its corresponding app by going through its notification settings and allow it to continuously record when a person is detected. The 4-megapixel smart camera shoots in Full HD (1920 x 1080) and has a 100-degree angle field of view. Storage is done internally and that means if you don’t get to your recording fast enough, someone could easily destroy the camera before you realised.
Sitting inside an aluminium shell that’s IP66 certified, you’ll mount the 50 x 200 x 110mm unit with the included mounting kit. In terms of the floodlight specifications, it’ll be a dimmable 12W LED unit with IR night vision detection up to 15 metres. Access your Netatmo camera through its free app that runs both on iOS (8 minimum) and Android (4.3 minimum).
From what we’re familiar with, other smart home security options require you to pay for their monthly based app subscriptions and services, so it’s pretty neat that you’ll save some money using Netatmo.
Presence is slated to make its way to homes around the world sometime during Fall 2016 while no pricing information has been released.
