Having heck of a time with motion detection/sensitvity

[bez825]

I just got my Arlo system and after a couple weeks still having a hard time with motion and sensitivty.  Here are my issues:

1. I have a camera facing my drive way and it also covers my front door.  It captures when leaving the house but does not kick on until someone is at my door...nothing before it like pulling in my driveway/walking up to the door.  Even at the sensitivity set to the highest I still have the issue and I get tons of videos of cars going up and down my street.  Is the camera too far away?  It's suctioned to my furthest front window so the range of view is pretty wide.  Should I move it closer and tweak the sensitivity?  I wish I could post a picture of what it sees but I want the camera to watch the front door as well as the driveway side.
2. The same camera somehow detects clouds moving in the sky (even on a low senitivity setting) so I have tons of videos of just clouds moving. Is this another case where i need to point the camera down and closer to what I need so it doesn't do that?

This is the front door camera with referenced in my 2 questions.

This is my garage view at night, I get the same issue with montion being late:

[jguerdat]

Yes. Positioning is key. The first image shows the camera to be rotated up too much. People detection is maybe 15-20 feet. Point only at the door and sidewalk leading up to it.

The cloud issue isn't actually clouds but IR reflections. The sun is a huge IR generator and clouds moving can cause the IR detectors to activate, just as moving leaves and branches can.

[d23wilson]

yeah, i get the same...just make sure you have a zone or couple of zones maybe set for your camera.

And maybe you get a lot of misses, when there are dark shadows cast near your door. i find mine, which is over the garage will pick up plenty when the sun is closer to being in front of the house, but when behind and there are dark shadows appearing around parts of the front, then it can miss quite a bit of activity..especially for people coming to the front door, directly from the street to the porch...where there are shadows and darkness.

If they come along the driveway, where there is ample light it seems to work fine.

the thing with this solution (arlo products), is they are great..but you have to do ALOOOTTTT of tweaking, and it is on-going.

So, i find zones & schedules, motion sensitivy settings all count depending on weather (windy, heat) etc. You may have 5 different settings.

one for windy days, one for the morning, depening on shadows, one for hot bright days, one for rainy days.

and then the positioning of the camera, plus zoning...sometimes i wonder (through pure speculation) if the more zones you have, the more confused it gets...i have no idea of the inner workings to that software solution...but i have my doubts based on my own biased pattern observations. So even then what it offers might sometimes be limited to the abilities of their complex solutions...are they complex, or was it a good idea that marketing/management has taken to the max?

[Drake3287]

Good advise from the others. I had the same problem when I first bought my camera's. Even have them mounted in the same locations as you. After playing with setting's and different loccations I'm pretty happy with results.

At this point I'm going to buy a third camera to complete my front yard coverage. Don't give up! Also, if your like me and have lot's of activations due to car's going buy, the solar charging panel should be available for our camera's fairly soon. These camera's pointed at streets take a toll on the battery level.