Essential Video Doorbell Wire Free Feature Request: Exclusion Zones

[greengriff]

Arlo Essential Wire-Free Video Doorbell #  My front garden is fairly small and my doorbell has a view of the road. Everytime a car passes (100+ times per day) it triggers a recording. This is rinsing the battery and wasting cloud storage. I'd like to be able to designate a 'no recording' zone in the same way as one can designate activity zones. I've created a couple of activity zones to cover just the areas I want to record but these have had no effect on stopping recording being triggered in other areas, so I'm not really sure what the point of them is

[jguerdat]

Activity zones don't stop recordings, they just don't show in the library.

The best way to eliminate these recordings is to reposition the camera so the road isn't in view. These cameras aren't for monitoring the whole neighborhood but to monitor people near your house.

https://kb.arlo.com/37/Arlo-Camera-Placement-Tips

[greengriff]

It's not a camera, it's a doorbell. If I mount it as per the instructions (so that it can see people at the door) then it can see vehicles passing.

[jguerdat]

Good point - I missed that.

I use a zone to exclude the street but also reduce the motion sensitivity in my modes and rules. I happen to use 45 as the motion detection setting but you may well need a different choice. That eliminates recordings from the street while still getting people walking up to the door.

[greengriff]

OK thanks, I'll try that and see how I get on.

[greengriff]

Well that hasn't worked. Surely it can't be too much of a stretch to code in exclusion zones where activity does not trigger a recording?

[StephenB]

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@greengriff wrote:

Well that hasn't worked. Surely it can't be too much of a stretch to code in exclusion zones where activity does not trigger a recording?

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Activity zones don't save a recording when motion is out-of-zone, but that is done in the Arlo Cloud, not the camera.  

The camera only captures video when the PIR (passive infrared) sensor triggers (or when livestreaming).  Processing that video in the camera (looking for motion in/out of zone) instead of the cloud would actually take more power, not less.  So it wouldn't help the battery drain.

The best solution (not always practical) is to power the doorbell with low voltage AC.  If there was a doorbell there before, you could use existing wiring.  There are plug-in transformers that work, or you could use hard-wired doorbell transformer.  Either way, the doorbell will trickle-charge the battery.

As @jguerdat already suggested, lowering the motion sensitivity is a second option.  You'd use the motion detection test to find the lowest threshold that reliably detects people coming to the door.  The challenge here is that it might not be low enough to reject the vehicles.

A third option (more expensive) is to get a second camera that covers the approach to the door, but not the street.  Then you can cross-trigger (using the second camera to trigger the doorbell camera to record), and not use the doorbell's PIR sensor.