Baby Cams & Nest

My reflections after 7 months of using a Nest Indoor Cam as a baby monitor solution.

Problem: I need a baby cam... but they all suck.

Baby cams are one of the many things that seem to still be stuck in the early 2000's technologically speaking. Moreover, who want's to spend $50-$100 on grabage hardware in software that has such a limited use-case you're just going to throw it away in a few years. So naturally, as a new father who is a tech professional, the standard baby cam products on the market weren't going to cut it.

Here's the requirements:

1. Modern Hardware & Software that'll last several years
2. A corresponding smartphone app to livestream video
3. 2 way audio support (we can hear baby, we can talk to baby if needed)
4. Great Security (no creepers please)
5. Do I need CCTV or a non-wifi enabled device? No. those are just security measures. If we find a camera that we can trust the security of, then we should be good to go.
6. Something that can be repurposed and isn't pointless when baby's a little older

Solution: Smart Cams

Not a problem, a minimal amount of creative thinking and problem solving yielded the obvious answer. A smart cam.

Alright, I'm already bought into Nest ecosystem at this point with some Nest Protects and a Nest thermostat; so a Nest Cam it is. It's a solution that seems to check all the boxes. So here's what we'll get:

1. Nest Indoor Cam
2. My old iPhone 6 (for the stand-alone monitor)
3. Spigen Kickstand

Sure, it's a little more expensive, but for a solution that can be reused to solve other problems, it's a small price to pay.

The Con's

You can't take them with you

Ok. So you can take them with you, it's just not super convenient.

The first time the grandparents want you to stay over at their house the panic sets in: "How will we make sure she isn't screaming? We can't easily take our smart cam with us?". My recommendation here is to just buy a super cheap audio monitor. It's good enough for a night or two here and there.

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Bandwidth & Service Outages

The Nest Cam App is apparently not built for continuous video streaming for extended periods of time. After about 45min of streaming on the app, there's an error which takes you out of the stream and you need to click back into it. The big problem with this is that if you're not paying attention and restart the stream when this occurs, your device thinks that it's not being used and goes to sleep. This means that you might think you're monitoring baby, but actually your device is sleeping, so if there's any screaming or movement going on, you're going to be completely unaware of it.

It's possible that this is a network connectivity issue; however, we have average internet (a mid-grade cable package). When you're downstairs streaming Netflix because baby is finally asleep and your monitor keeps going out because of the you apparently don't have enough bandwith to support both video streams and whatever else is randomly going on on your network, it kind of harshes the let's-finally-spend-some-hang-time-as-a-couple-vibe that you just had going for you.

Additionally, Nest goes down... a lot... (looking at you Google 😠). Perhaps this has been a particularly frustrating 12 months for Nest & Google, but they've had a pretty significant service outage at least once a quarter if not more, and quite frankly, I'm over it.

This has been probably the single most frustrating thing about using the Nest Cam in this capacity.

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Internet Dependency

That's right, it needs a connection to the internet. No internet. No worky. No monitor.

So that means when your electric provider decides to do some work on the power lines or there's a storm in the area and screws up your cable: No monitor.

This leads into my second largest beef with the Nest Cam.

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Cloud Storage Only

If you want to access historical video with your Nest Cam, your out of luck unless you want to pay a ba-gillion dollars for their cloud storage service. So that means you get realtime only with a some occasional completely useless still images when it detects activity.

Nest does not give you the option to stream your video to a local storage device on your local network. Which again, is not only frustrating because they want you to take out a second mortgage to get video streaming, but it would also greatly alleviate the issues mentioned above with the bandwidth and internet outages.

If I Did It Over Again

If I were going to do it over again I'd add 2 requirements to my original list:

1. Modern Hardware & Software that'll last several years
2. A corresponding smartphone app to livestream video
3. 2 way audio support (we can hear baby, we can talk to baby if needed)
4. Great Security (no creepers please)
5. Do I need CCTV or a non-wifi enabled device? No. those are just security measures. If we find a camera that we can trust the security of, then we should be good to go.
6. Something that can be repurposed and isn't pointless when baby's a little older
7. Local streaming & Local Storage
8. Get a cheap audio monitor for travel

The local streaming would solve bandwidth issues, and provide a better service where I could scrub to earlier in a day and see exactly what was going on without having to pay Nest every month.

This is what my shopping list would look like:

1. Nest Indoor Cam
2. My old iPhone 6 (for the stand-alone monitor)
3. Spigen Kickstand
4. A Synology
5. Probably something from their "Value Series" like the DS418play or DS218play
6. Something Like a FosCam or an Amcrest Cam

The Synology is a little expensive sure, but they're awesome, and multi purpose. They can be used for network file storage, computer backups, a dropbox replacement, aaaand they have something called "Surveillance Staton" built into them, that'll record video streamed from an IP cam.

I'd connect my IP cam up to my Synology, and I'd be off.

Hope you found this helpful!