Time & Perspective

Our house has security cameras scattered about the property. The reasons for this are a few but suffice it to say it has a lot more to do with my propensity for tinkering than any actual safety issues.

I have two vendors I use; Zmodo and Wyze, and I like each vendor for different strengths they bring to the table. I also actually prefer having multiple vendors for systems in the event one vendor has server issues, the other hopefully will still be up and running. Any integration and simplification advantages from having only one platform have been made moot with the Amazon Alexa platform.

Back a few months ago I saw a pretty good deal on a pair of Zmodo fixed outdoor wireless cams that would help cover a couple of areas currently not covered. I unpacked em and although they looked very similar to the previous models they did use a slightly different and supposedly easier software setup method. Using the existing smartphone app to display a QR Code and aim the camera at to automagically identify the new cam in the platform. It worked fantastically for the first camera, but the second camera would not setup no matter how I fiddled with any variables I could imagine.

So once I got to right before the moment I smashed it with a hammer and threw it over the back fence while proclaiming to no one in particular that I would never never never never buy anything from Zmodo again - I decided to set it on the self and tinker with some other task. And there is sat for months and months until I had calmed down to the point where I was willing to do a little research and more fiddling.

I started by recreating the exact same steps that were unsuccessful previously. I know this is the very definition of insanity, but in my defense, if Zmodo had pushed thru some app revision I was unaware of and resolved this problem it was certainly worth a few minutes of presumed insane behavior.

No luck.

OK, what do the interwebs say...a whole lot of nothing with one small spark of inspiration. There it was "....the problem might be the camera is not focused" Now granted, most of the fiddling I did was moving the camera closer and  further away from the QR code in hopes of hitting the sweet spot and getting to move on with my life. But that little tidbit on the Googles got me to thinking - what if, instead of moving the camera to and fro a tiny fixed image on the smartphone i instead blew up the image to make it easier to see. A quick screenshot on my phone and sending it to my email address so could zoom in on a big monitor and voila! Success!

Like so many times I've been stuck on something, simply walking away for a bit and thinking about something else before coming back to the same problem is all I need to have a breakthrough.


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