V2 vs WCO: standard settings, no services

In general, I find the V2 is much more reliable and dependable as a general surveillance camera.

Motion Capture:
The WCO seems to require a longer period of motion before the logic decides to generate a clip. As a result, when a clip is generated, the motion is missing about 5 seconds. The net result, about 40% of legitimate motion is not captured that a V2 does capture. Much of what is captured is towards the end.

In contrast, the V2 clip starts just before the motion that triggered it, or close to the beginning. In very few cases does it not capture motion as expected.

Detection Zone:
This feature does not seem to matter on the WCO. Unless the motion is in the PIR Effective Area, I see no difference. The only time this seems to work is if I am in Live View.

On the V2, this helped eliminate reflections and glare that had been triggering clips. For example, I blocked out a section of my window that previously picked up reflections from inside the home.

Battery:

The WCO uses a lot of battery to handle motion detection. Also, the battery does not handle cold weather very well.

Placing one WCO inside, facing a wall, the battery showed almost no drainage over several days. This same unit had been over 4% daily, even worse in the recent cold weather. In the warmer months, it was 2% daily.

Adding another WCO a few days ago, in freezing temperatures, the consumption is 4% average. It it about 2% with no motion going on. As activity begins to increase, consumption worsens.

My next step is to place my older WCO outside again. The battery had become unstable outside, just a 24 hour lifespan. It also was only generating motion clips about 5% of the time there was motion for more than 5 seconds.

My general thoughts are: if I am comfortable adding an outlet outside, I would like to see if a V3 works best there.

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Thanks for the write up! Some comments…

This is because more is happening with the WCO, than the v2. In the v2, the pixel detection is working the whole time because it is fully powered and once an event is detected, and event is started. In the WCO it’s normally in a sleep state, and the pir detects motion, the camera wakes up and starts recording. If the event passes the sensitivity setting, then the event is saves and uploaded. The v2 doesn’t need to 'wake up", which is the added time you speak of. Normally this is about a second ir two.

The detection zone in the wco is fixed, because it’s hardware set. It’s a different system than the pixel change system of the v2. The motion detection isn’t actively running on the WCO when you are in live view, that’s a battery saver.

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The WCO now includes the same Detection Zone that the V2 offers. The fixed PIR, which I also noted, still exists as well. They effectively overlap.

It is my observation that the Detection Zone is not working. It actually worked 2 times, I was in Live View at those times.

As for the sensitivity settings, I have adjusted them on theWCO. The only difference is that at 100, I did get a few clips from reflections. Vehicles still pass by and many times are ignored

I discovered something weird. Before connecting the 2nd WCO, I moved my SD card to it from the older one. Yesterday I checked and both WCOs were not recognizing the SD card in the Base.

I could not find a way, through the App, to remedy the problem. I removed and put the SD card back in the Base, nothing changed.

Next I opened the settings for the 1st WCO, the removed and replaced the SD card in the Base. The 1st WCO now recognized the card. The 2nd WCO still did not. So, stayed in that cams settings while also removing and replacing the card once more in the Base. Now both WCOs recognize the SD card is in the Base.

This still does not remedy that the old WCO is not registering any motion clips. The 2nd one is capturing about 40% of motion, that’s being generous.

The wifi signal is fine for both. I see there are multiple Beta fixes being tested to address the issues with WCOs not generating motion clips.

I still feel the issue with that is on the side where the server first analyzes clips before deciding if they contain valid motion. By not validating motion, there is no return cycle which might extend battery life. Yet, render the purpose of the camera towards being useless.