Motion Detecting Small animals with Arlo Pro

[shanay]

I suspect there are small animals in my background which are causing some damage to my plants. I do not know if these are squirels or other rodents. I already have an Arlo pro camera which is very good at detecting motion. So I tried to use it to detect which of these small animals are responsible. I have already followed all instructions for making the optimum use of the camera for motion detection, set the motion detection to 100% etc. But the camera seems unable to detect these small animals. The "losses" to the plants continues to mount. Is there something special that needs to be done OR is the camera not meant for this use case ? Any pointers appreciated.

Thanks

[TomMac · Accepted solution]

Yes. it is very easy to get small animals like birds and chipmonks.... You just need to bring the camera dow nto their level as they have a very small IR target to trigger the camera.

[dfwald]

I'm assuming the Arlo Pro's motion detection works similarly to the Arlo in that it is most sensitive to anything moving at right angles to the camera face.  If so, you'd have to align the camera face to what you suspect is 90 degrees to the animal movements.  I have a camera mounted over 7' up and pointed at an angle downward and still have picked up squirrels at night so you don't have to have a camera mounted very low on the ground as long as it is angled correctly.  Anything moving directly toward the camera isn't picked up at all.  Hope the Pro is better in that use case.

[PaulTopping]

I bought the Arlo Pro to capture animals (coyotes, skunks, cats, etc.) entering my yard. From what I read here the motion detection is not sensitive enough for that purpose. Although someone mentions placing the camera closer to the subject as a solution, that obviously is not going to work except in limited applications (eg, finding out what is eating a particular plant). The lack of suitability to this application should be noted in your advertising and brochure. Is there some way to solve this problem? If not, I will be returning it and warning others of this issue on social media.

[dfwald]

Coyotes, cats and skunks are all much larger and have a larger IR signature than squirrels and birds. You should be able to pickup the larger animals you are concerned about without mounting low.

[PaulTopping]

With the sensitivity set to 100%, it occasionally detects my cats when they walk toward the camera but not all the time. I wish the sensitivity could be cranked up to 11 or 12.  Just a bit more would do it. Of course, it also means it may trigger on things like the wind moving the leaves on the trees but then I would back it off. Perhaps this is why Netgear doesn't allow it to be more sensitive. It would cause more cloud storage to be used due to more frequent triggering.

[shanay]

Thank you for your response. You seem to have managed to detect these small cirtters.I tried mounting the camera really low and bumping up the sensitivity to 100. That did not help and there were false alarms. There were notifications but when I went to view the videos, there was nothing there which could have triggered it, except perhaps moving leaves.. I must mention here that my yard is quite large and maybe the camera had a tough time in contacting the base station. And coming to think of it, the manufacturer claims that it is "pet friendly" which I guess is another way of saying "it will not detect small animals"

[shanay]

You may be right. I had mounted the camera really low and was unable to detect anything.  I could have tried mounting it higher to see if that helped. But even if it did not, my yard is pretty large and outside of the "normal range"  and I cannot really fault the manufacturer, especially when he/she claims it is pet friendly, which by defintion means " cannot detect small animals"

[TomMac]

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PaulTopping wrote:

I bought the Arlo Pro to capture animals (coyotes, skunks, cats, etc.) entering my yard. From what I read here the motion detection is not sensitive enough for that purpose.

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With my Pro... I can easily pick up cats and a racoon ( that's been driving me crazy ) at a distance of 20ft... But the camera is on a smal tripod set at 1-2ft off the ground... smaller than above( birds, chipmonk), yes, you need to be closer about 10ft max for good trigger events

[PaulTopping]

I found that although I thought I had set the sensitivity high it was in fact not high. Now that I've set it higher, it is being triggered by my cats. It also gets triggered by trees rustled by the wind but I can live with that. To make it detect animals but not movement of leaves would require a lot more computing horsepower. Perhaps someday they will add such features.

I'm a software engineer and I can say with great confidence that the Arlo software is in need of some user interface (UI) tweaking. UI is surprisingly hard to do well. Here are two areas in which they could improve it:

1) The Motion Sensitivity Test is under Settings but does not, in fact, set anything. You have to change a Mode to do that. They could fix this by either (a) adding an option here to set the sensitivity for the current mode or (b) adding some text explaining that one has to change the sensitivity in Modes. As it is currently designed, the user has to remember the desired percentage they determined in Motion Sensitivity Test and re-enter it in a completely different part of the app. That's just silly.

2) In Modes, you have to actually choose Edit to simply find out the current motion sensitivity setting (and, presumably, the same for other settings). That is a classic UI faux pas. They should simply display a summary of the settings in the Mode List and/or provide a way to View Settings. Doing this would also give the user verification that changes to the settings "took" which would have helped me immensely.