Connect SmartHome CSH-FLCAM-1

Not the best cheaper camera around – I recently bought 3 of these cameras and 3 solar panel chargers ( CSH-ODSLR-5W ) from Harvey Norman, thinking that as Harvey Norman, JB Hi FI and The Good Guys were selling them that they would be " reputable ". I have now discovered numerous shortcomings / problems with these cameras and solar chargers. 1: When I tried to plug the solar chargers in, I discovered that the charge lead had a USB C end, whereas the camera has a micro USB slot, necessitating a pigtail adapter lead, which the company sent out to me quickly. 2 : The cameras have a rubber flap on the charge port / micro SD slot to weatherproof the camera. However, when the solar charge lead is plugged in you CAN NOT close the rubber flap, so there goes your IP65 weatherproofing ! Luckily I was able to mount my 3 under the roofline, otherwise the charging from panel option would be useless ! 3 : The so called user manual gives good detail on how to connect to the app, but NO detail on how to use all the settings ! Despite being fairly tech savvy, it took me several days of fumbling with settings to get the cameras to work properly. Simple things like : the night mode needs to be set to colour record instead of IR for the floodlights to trigger, and in the record setting it needs to be set to " local " to record on the micro SD etc ! 4 : The camera only records and floodlights for 15 seconds at a time, and then takes 10 seconds to reset to start recording / floodlighting again ! The camera really should record / floodlight uninterrupted as long as it is sensing motion, as who knows what you will miss in that 10 second " hiatus " !! There is no way to change the recording / floodlight time, which IMHO is just ridiculous ! There is no mention of this in any of the blurb / details about the cameras. Had I known this before hand I WOULD NOT HAVE BOUGHT THEM. 5 : Today was the first day that I have had one of new solar chargers connected to one camera. I received an alert to say battery was full, and I thought, that's fine. Then for the next 5 minutes I was bombarded with alerts every 15-20 seconds, then it eventually settled down. The next day I received 32 alerts in 30 minutes, which is just crazy!

Now, a couple of positives. 1 : Their tech people were good at responding to my emails for help. 2 : The picture quality is reasonable for a " cheap" camera, although the 1080 is only 15 FPS. 3 : Quite easy to connect to WIFI, and reasonable wifi range. 4 : Records to a micro Sd card, even a 32gb will hold hundreds of hours of footage. 5. Motion detection works well with a good range of at least 8 metres.

Hope this helps someone !