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If global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) stopped working, life would get confusing pretty quickly, since we use them for everything from driving directions to keeping computer clocks updated. Even a 13-microsecond satellite clock error in 2016 ended up causing a lot of headaches until it was fixed. Thus, it’s probably a good thing that GPS isn’t the only satellite navigation system in existence – Russia, the EU, and China all have their own satellite constellations, and there are even smaller regional systems that help make coverage of certain areas more precise. In fact, your phone is probably counting on two or three different satellite constellations… Read more
REVIEW – Home security has emerged to be a very DIY sector of the home improvement market and along with our ADT monitored system, we have added cameras to the front, back and now side of the house with the SANSI Stellar Floodlight Camera. We had been wanting to add a camera on the side of the house but knew we would need some lighting as well with the way driveway runs along the side of the house.
What is it?
The SANSI Stellar Floodlight Camera is a hardwired, wifi-enabled security camera and floodlight with motion sensing and night vision capabilities.
What’s in the box?
Camera and Floodlight Unit
Instruction Book
Mounting Hardware
Design and features
The unit features a full HD camera, with adjustable motion sensing allowing you to choose the distance from the camera you want to have notifications for motion. The camera has a 270 degree viewing angle so it is ideal for an area where you desire a wide angle view. Internal 16gb memory allows for up to 70 hours of recording. The dual LED lights provide 3600lm of light that comes on either by physical command via the app or wall switch, or via motion detection. Additionally, this camera does allow you to talk back and forth through it with whoever is outside. We did test this a bit initially and while it does work, it is on about a 7 second delay so it’s not in real time. Finally, it has an alarm that we did not test as we didn’t want to frighten our neighbors but it is a setting that you can enable for added security.
Setup and Performance
This camera was very easy to physically install, if you’ve ever replaced a light fixture or ceiling fan in your home this isn’t much different. Simply flip the breaker, remove the old light, then follow the step by step instructions to connect the white, black and ground wires properly and mount to the plate included in the product.
The difficult part, however, is when you get to the app and connecting the camera up to your wifi. It was very finicky at first and we had to reset it once to get it to recognize our wifi signal – even then we had to make multiple attempts to get it to recognize and connect to the wifi. Then, it literally took us two weeks of fussing with the app before we were able to sync the time to our current time zone, and this only happened because there was an update to the camera software that was released (I believe). Previous to this, the time was so off sync that we had videos labeled as being in the middle of the night and it was full daylight – also we couldn’t access videos except if they were hours and hours old. But after the update to the camera software, the times synced up and all videos to the current were accessible.
The app itself isn’t the most user friendly, and gets a bit bug-y at times with allowing you to access and download videos. If you aren’t connected with a strong wifi signal, you’ll only get the first 5 seconds or so downloaded – we’ve found we need to be pretty close to it to get the videos to download reliably.
We were able to capture the below video of some vicious intruders into our yard – which, if they had been actual thugs meant to do harm, I believe would provide sufficient and great evidence capable to be turned over to police to help capture the criminal.
As far as storage, it is nice to have 70 hours of recording space on the internal memory, however, it would be nice to at least have the option to store video to the cloud. If you don’t catch it before it’s recorded over then you’ve lost the video forever. This could be a problem if you’re away for an extended period of time without a strong wifi signal to download any videos of interest.
You can set up the app to send notifications when motion is detected – and depending on how much you want to be bothered this can be a blessing or a curse as sometimes the camera picks up simple motions such as moving tree limb shadows and reports them as motion. But realistically, you’re wanting to get those notifications if you have concerns about the security of your home.
What I like
Bright lighting to deter thieves or intruders via motion detection
HD quality video is perfect for security footage
Easy physical install
70 hours of recorded videos on internal memory
No subscription plan
What I’d change
Cloud access for storage
Better app/user interface – too many bugs and glitches and too difficult to make setting changes especially at initial install.
Would be nice to have more precise controls over notifications – as is, it’s basically on or off with some limited adjustments to the viewing distance/area.
Final thoughts
Overall, this product has become a welcome member of our home security – now being our 4th camera installed and third different brand. It measures up to the others in both video quality and reliability once we got the kinks out and were able to get the settings right. It definitely isn’t “ready to go” out of the box – so some tinkering and adjustments will need to be made to get it aligned to your needs. But in the end, I think most will be pretty happy with the footage, quality and sense of security it provides. Knowing it picks up even cats and raccoons really puts our mind at ease that if a person or persons were trying to be nefarious, we would not only have the footage to show the officials but we could talk through it or possibly sound an alarm as well to keep our home safe. However, I will say that if we had purchased this unit for install and had the trouble we did with it, I am not 100% certain we would have had the patience to see it through to the point where everything worked correctly. Be patient though, it’s worth the small annoyances in getting it to that point.
Price: $169.99 Where to buy: Amazon Source: The sample of this product was provided by SANSI.
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REVIEW – Do you have a dash cam in your vehicle yet? A dash cam is a type of gadget that you install and then forget about it. The hope is that you’ll never need it unless it’s to review some fun footage it captured instead of accident footage.
Choosing a dash cam can be similar to choosing a laptop or a smartphone. There are so many dash cams available that it can be difficult to choose one. I’m here today to make your choice even more difficult because I’m going to tell you about the 522GW dash cam from Nextbase. Put on your seatbelt and let’s take it for a ride.
What is it?
The Nextbase 522GW dash cam is a camera that sticks to your windshield and automatically records video footage as you drive your vehicle.
Hardware specs
Resolution: 2560×1440 @ 30fps, 1080p HD @ 60fps
Lens: 6 layer f1.3
Viewing Angle: 140°
Screen: 3″ HD IPS Touch screen
GPS: 10Hz
Bluetooth: Bluetooth 4.2
What’s in the box?
522GW dash cam
Windshield suction mount
Click & Go GPS mount
Power cable fitting tool
Vehicle power adapter
mini USB cable
Design and features
The 522GW dash cam is one of the larger dash cams that I’ve had the opportunity to review. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that it will be easily noticed if someone looks at your windshield.
As you can see, the lens sticks out from the body of the dashcam quite a bit. If you look closely at the image above and the one below, you can see that the front edge of the lens has an adjustable polarizing filter ring. You can turn this ring to reduce any glare from your dash board.
You will also notice the USB port. This can be used to connect the camera to your computer in order to transfer video files.
On one side of the camera, there is a covered port that can be used to attach an optional rear camera or connect the camera to a larger monitor using an HDMI cable.
The other side of the camera has a power button and a micro SD card slot.
On the bottom of the Nextbase 522GW dash cam is a light sensor for the Screen Dimming feature and a reset switch.
The back of the camera has a large color touch screen that you use to customize the settings. You can do this through the myNextbase Connect app as well. Since the settings configuration and even a live view of the camera can be accomplished through the MyNextbase app, a built-in screen really isn’t needed.
Below the display is a red button that you can press to make a separate video file containing 10 seconds prior to the button press and 20 seconds after the button press. This video file is saved to the Protected folder on the micro SD card.
There’s a magnetic cover on the front of the camera that protects a connector for the included Click & Go GPS mount.
The Click & Go GPS mount is a windshield mount that uses 3M adhesive. But if you’re like me and prefer not to stick a strong adhesive directly to your windshield, you can remove the adhesive part of the Click & Go GPS mount and attach it to the included suction mount and use that instead.
The suction mount has a lever that makes it easy to stick and unstick the mount from the windshield.
Once installed on your windshield, the power cable can be routed and hid under the car’s headliner and plastic molding around the windshield using the included tool. This tool helps you wedge the cable under the plastic for a much neater installation.
The myNextbase Connect app
You don’t have to use the myNextbase Connect app with this dash cam, but doing so makes it easier to configure the camera’s settings and watch/download recordings without removing the microSD card from the camera.
Setting up the app is relatively easy, but I did find it to be a little fiddly at times. For one thing, the app connects to the dash cam via WiFi and initiating that connection can be painfully slow. I also had issues configuring the Alexa feature. But more about that in a minute.
There are many settings that you can adjust and features that can be toggled. Some of these settings include:
You can also toggle the screensaver so that your speed is shown on the dash cam’s display instead of the live view.
Accessing the video from the dash cam is easy with the app. I like that the Nextbase app collects speed, and GPS info so that it can show an animated map of your travels for each video clip.
Some of the other features of this dash cam include:
Intelligent Parking Mode (Incident Aware)
When this feature is enabled, it records any bump or physical movement on the vehicle when left unattended. Of course, this means that you’ll need to provide power to the camera at all times for it to work.
I didn’t crash my car on purpose to test this feature, but it was activated when I drove over a pothole and it saved a locked video that wouldn’t be overwritten.
Emergency SOS
In the event of an accident where the driver is unresponsive, the Nextbase Emergency SOS feature can alert the emergency services of your location along with important medical details that you add to the app.
When an accident is detected, the Emergency SOS feature will do some checks before contacting emergency services. This includes calling your phone. If you answer it, it will cancel the action to contact emergency services.
Alexa
The feature that I had the most trouble setting up was the Alexa feature. This feature requires that you also install the Alexa app on your phone and have it running when you want to use this feature. My first attempt configuring Alexa with the 522GW Nextbase dash cam wasn’t successful and I ended up having to uninstall the MyNextbase Connect app, the Alexa app, and the Bluetooth pairing with the dash cam on my phone. Then I had to reinstall and reconfigure everything. Doing all of this was successful but it only allowed me to test the Alexa feature for one test drive. The next time I tried it, it wouldn’t work again and I refused to uninstall everything for a 2nd time to try to get it working.
I questioned the people at Nextbase as to why an Alexa feature would even be necessary or desirable when you could just use the Alexa app on your phone and be done with it. This was the response that I received.
Here is why you would want Alexa in the Dash Cam rather than just on your phone:
1 – The Nextbase Dash Cam has two inbuilt microphones specifically tuned to pick up speech in a car – making the recognition of your voice commands significantly better than through a single microphone on a phone. Having 2 very sensitive microphones near your head is very beneficial to voice recognition.
2- In order to make Alexa work on a phone you need to “press” the Alexa symbol on the phone to activate it. With the Dash Cam you don’t need to touch the screen
3- As the dash cam is connected to your phone, you will shortly be able to “control” the dash cam with commands like “take a photo” or “lock that video” – using an upcoming Nextbase dash cam “Skill”. This will soon give handsfree control of the dash cam.
4- You can have you phone in a bag/pocket and still control Alexa – to then play music through your car speakers etc
If you notice their third reason, it states that the Nextbase skill is not yet available. So at this time, you can only use the feature for other Alexa commands like asking about the weather, playing music, etc. It’s also important to know that the audio from Alexa comes from your phone and not the dash cam. So yeah, I really don’t see the point.
Video quality
Let’s see some video clips from the Nextbase 522GW dash cam.
If you don’t want all the info at the bottom of each video, you can toggle off the various stamps like time, GPS, and speed.
Desktop app
Nextbase also offers a desktop app for Windows and Mac that will let you load the videos from the micro SD card to see the same info that you can see when you watch them through the mobile app.
What I like
Built-in GPS
Expansion capability for rear cameras
Trip info in app
Mounting options
What I’d change
Lower the price
Improve connection speed between app and camera
Implement Alexa skills
Fix Alexa connectivity problems
Final thoughts
The Nextbase 522GW is a nice dash cam and it worked well for me except for the Alexa feature and slow WiFi connection. The camera has good video quality in day time and night time. I do think it’s a little overpriced though as I’ve seen other 2K dash cams with GPS capability and G-Sensor features for less than $200.
Price: $259.99 Where to buy: Nextbase Source: The sample for this review was provided by Nextbase.
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