Octocam as surveillance video

Support
1

I finally have Octocam working as a surveillance video so it sends me a series of photographs of anyone who appears at the front door. Very good value and quite inobtrusive. The installation of MotionEyes works just as it says in the tutorial. The problem is setting it up.
There is no manual for MotionEyes, the explanations of all the commands hover above the question spots when you mouse over them. Which means it doesn’t work on an iPad, there is no pointer. So you have to use a Mac or a PC to set it up.
MotionEyes works with the Wifi in the ZeroW, it does not work with a RPi wifi dongle plugged into a Pi Zero.
The Pi ZeroW is quite slow. It will not attach pictures to an email if there is a lot of data in the Camera1 folder. The email program times out waiting for the Pi to respond and sends an a mail wiith no pictures attached.
So it all takes a bit of fine tuning!

Andrew

2

The Pi Zeros and Zero Ws are definitely slower than some of the bigger boards like the RPI 3, but they’re not too bad for their teeny size.
They do struggle sometimes to move around big files, but you can cut down on this problem by getting a “faster” SD card; some brands like Sandisk specifically advertise their data transfer rates on the packaging, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find one.
I’m not sure why MotionEyes shouldn’t work with the WIFI dongle; sounds like an issue worth addressing, since they’re most likely unaware!
You could also try using a different mailing API in order to send your pictures (I’m unsure of how Octocam does this…), but since your pictures are generally all going to be quite big, I’d say you’d be hard pressed to find one that runs quicker on a Zero. :)