Floureon IPCAM

A little while ago I purchased a very cheap Floureon Wifi IP Camera webcam.  It comes with a short user guide to setup the device.  You start by downloading the Camhi software onto your phone or ipad.  The webcam has wifi and ethernet connections.  You introduce the handheld device to the webcam by holding them physically close together and allowing the ipad to start an audio dialog with the webcam to establish its ip address.  Once they have "paired" in this rather novel fashion you can look at the camera output on the ipad and swipe in any direction on the screen to pan/tilt the camera so that it shows what you want to see.  The picture quality is detailed and clear with good colour, sound is also available, I found the movement functions tedious.  You can take snapshots or record videos and optionally save them to an SD card. I couldn't find any further details about the webcam online so at face value you have a very nice webcam with an interface to a handheld device.

My current application requirement is to provide a nightime garden webcam to look for activity, particularly from foxes.  I need to record video when motion is detected in the picture so that it can be looked at the next day.   I have a Raspberry pi noir webcam which isn't being terribly useful for this purpose although it did previously carry out great service as a puppy cam in our kitchen.

As the supplied CamHi software doesn't have the functions we require (in particular motion based recording), it is necessary to find other ways to access the webcam via its network interface. A very helpful open source site ispyconnect provides details of URLs which can be used to access webcams.  We know our ip address 192.168.0.175 and user/password admin:admin.
To take a snapshot from the camera we can use a chrome URL:
 http://admin:admin@192.168.0.175/snap.jpg
To stream a video from the camera we can Open a network stream in vlc with:
 rtsp://admin:admin@192.168.0.175/1/h264major
The video can be streamed at a lower resolution with:
 rtsp://admin:admin@192.168.0.175/2/h264major

For the picamera we have previously used linux motion software very successfully to process a video stream and record only when motion is detected.  We can utilise the stream coming from the webcam by specifying in motion.conf configuration file netcam_url the rtsp streaming address.  Once we restart the motion service (on RPi pi34) we can view camera output at http://pi34:8081.

I am quite keen to be able to be able to control pan/tilt from linux or PC.  I found that I can login to its network interface http://192.168.0.175.

In addition to showing the camera view it allows me to use pan and tilt.  "Left and right", "up and down" buttons cause the camera to scan throughout its range.  You can view two streams, full detail  (1280x720) or smaller (640x352).  There are 8 preset positions you can setup.

The settings tab is informative, allowing you to see/set many more features on the camera (e.g. turn IR on / off).  The network page includes settings for ONVIF, which is already on at port 8080.  This should allow me to use a general purpose ONVIF client to control the camera.  ispyconnect has a suitable client Agent DVR which I could install on Windows.

After a little experimentation I was able to setup the camera in ispy Agent UI and see the camera.  It also gives me a device service URL http://192.168.0.175:8080/onvif/devices .  Using Ispy PTZ controls are a bit better.

I was now ready to try out the solution.  It turns out, quite reasonably, that infra red light reflects well off glass (which is designed to let optical wavelengths through) so attempts at a setup inside were not successful.  As the weather is good I took the IPCAM outside and set it up in the garden.  Using the web interface I set the IR leds on continuously.  I setup linux motion software to record when movement is detected.  I set the sensitivity quite high to capture small changes, and I did capture various moths / insects whizzing by, but I did also see the fox doing his/her evening walk across the garden just before midnight.  The motion software worked well, it only recorded about 5 minutes video overnight so it isn't onerous to look through the recording.