Circle View Cameras Recording Every Few Seconds
I have 3 circle view cameras, all of them included in my Apple Homekit setup. They’ve been working fine for months. Yesterday one of the cameras began recording roughly once a minute without having detected anything. I tried many options to get it to stop, including making the detection zone very small. I finally deleted the camera from Homekit and unplugged it from power. When I reconnected it things worked fine. Today that camera and another are behaving the same way again. I can’t get them to stop recording every few seconds. They a show a detection occurred for each recording but in fact there was nothing that could have triggered a detection. What’s going on?
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One is inside on the second floor looking out a window at my front yard/street. The other is in the backyard looking at the back of my house. Third one looking at front porch never misbehaved - all 3 the most recent model. The motion detections occurred without anything moving. Not cars, people, animals, foliage, blowing leaves, shadows, aircraft - absolutely nothing. Believe me I looked extremely carefully at many recordings. I tried many settings, delete and add accessory, power off and on, reset button, different detection options, delete recordings, go from stream only then back to record and then finally setting the detection zone to a patch of ground about one square foot - same behavior. It also occurred day and night - front yard in dark visible light without IR and backyard using the IR source. The upstairs room the camera is in is not occupied and the lights are off and door closed. I’d watch the scenes on my iPad and every few seconds it would record for no reason on a very regular cycle of about every 10 or 15 seconds.
That said - for reasons unknown to me the behavior stopped late yesterday. The only thing I can recall doing before it stopped is once again deleting recordings because they were growing quickly.
So, for the moment (and second time) MY issue is resolved but there’s certainly something about that behavior should be fixed. I’ll be back here if/when it occurs again.
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The fact that it “fixes” itself and the erratic behavior stops would lead me to believe the hardware side of the camera is fine (at least the sensors that detect motion). From my understanding these motion sensors detect infrared light passively, meaning they passively wait for a heat source to pass their field of view and then trigger an alarm/notification/automation etc.
With your backyard camera (by the way I never thought to image the rear of my house, I would have used two mounted cameras to cover the rear, that is a good idea on your part) it may be possible that windows are causing reflected heat to trip the motion detector giving false alarms. I know you have focused your zone, but light can hit at many angles when reflected. I’d argue the same for your indoor camera, it is possible your glass may cause the same effect. But this happening at night would throw water on my guesses. Although any difference in heat is what these sensors notice.
To help troubleshoot, if these cameras act up again, I’d access them and point them in another direction completely or cover them with a something that prevents them from detecting light all together and see if the problem goes away. I know you’d hate to fly blind, but maybe relocate them to a spot that focuses directly at a wall or something like that. Just to see if the problem shows itself again in an isolated spot.
Maybe that all sounds a little far-fetched, but when these things act up I try to eliminate as many variables as I can. There is a guy from Logitech in here named Chris who helps out with the problems posted on these forums(there may be others, I dunno), he is good, he helped me with a door bell issue I was having. Just be patient
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The view of the back of the house is due to my wired brick BBQ enclosure on the back patio providing a location that can see a view from the side gate entry, across the house side and back doors all the way across the pool and to the other side of the house. Agreed, hardware seems unlikely if it fixes itself. If it's "software" there's a myriad of possible sources considering camera firmware interacting with Apple Homekit installations on multiple computers and accessories. That's a potential rat's nest of complication that nobody in "support" will ever take-on unless there's a previously documented problem and solution. They just point their finger "to the other guy". I'm familiar with stray light, firmware, software, sensors in general, signal processing etc etc (retired aerospace chief engineer). I did try multiple scenes for the camera to include pointing it to the base - no joy.
Just hoping it doesn't happen again. Thanks for the reply
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With Apple in particular it is a double-edged sword. They have their proprietary software and communication protocols which makes for secure data transfer and offers nifty features, but also makes it a troubleshooting nightmare in some cases. I work on instrumentation at a chemical plant and I am use to having access to every resource I need to fix a problem. I would imagine with your work history you’d have the same sentiment when it comes to troubleshooting.
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Well, I'm not sure if it was that Apple Home started using a new device as the main hub (it has bounced around between the three we have) or, if was something I saw mentioned on another three: I simply removed all the members except for me (since I set it all up, it won't remove me of course), and maybe ten minutes later the cameras started recording again. Voodoo.
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