Cuddelink

[alloutdoors]

I bought a couple of the Cuddelink Long Range IR cams a few weeks ago to test out and was happy enough with them to add more and expand the system. I pulled the card from the home camera this morning and so far so good. The thumbnail images that get transmitted back to the home camera are more than adequate to see what I want to see. I'll continue to post images here as I get them, and if anyone has specific questions on the Cuddelink system just ask. So far everything is working as advertised. I did have one camera with an odd issue out of the box, but it is at Cuddeback at the moment for them to look at and fix or replace. For some reason it was missing several menu options and reflashing the firmware did nothing. Not sure how that could happen but I have to believe that's a pretty rare issue, and I'm sure they will deal with it.

First image is directly from the home camera. This was a full 20MP image sized down for the web.

 

The rest of these were taken by remote cams and these are the "thumbnails" that were transmitted back to the home camera. These aren't resized at all, this is exactly what is pulled off the card at the home camera. They meet my needs, and I can always go pull the original full size images off the camera that took them if needed.

[grampy]

Trigger speed is awesome on your cams! And nice pictures too! I think I'll look into these! Thanks for sharing!

[greg54]

cool pics

[Adkhunter1590]

I was really curious about these, thanks for sharing! The whole system sounds like a great idea, I just have had reservations on trusting cuddeback reliability. Keep us all updated on how they continue to work. Would sure like to just check the home cam in the yard without having to run the atv all around the property.

[alloutdoors]

32 minutes ago, Adkhunter1590 said:

I was really curious about these, thanks for sharing! The whole system sounds like a great idea, I just have had reservations on trusting cuddeback reliability. Keep us all updated on how they continue to work. Would sure like to just check the home cam in the yard without having to run the atv all around the property.

Yeah, the only prior hands on experience I've had with Cuddeback goes way back to their DC-200 film cameras when we were using about 20 of them on a research project. Their reputation definitely seems to have taken a hit since then from what I have read, but the reviews I had seen on the Cuddelink cameras have been pretty positive, including from people who have had them out since last summer with no issues to report so far. Hopefully they have turned over a new leaf. My experience dealing with them on the phone regarding the one camera that was defective out of the box has been positive so far as well. The real test will be how they are performing a year or more down the road. We will see. There's no denying the convenience of the system though. I'm looking forward to the Home Plus unit coming out in the near future. The cameras are deployed across my and my parents properties, and I plan to put the home unit at their house connected to a computer (I don't have a house on site, I'm a few miles away). Once that is set up I should have access to all the pics from my phone, if everything works the way they've pitched it on their website.

[alloutdoors]

Pulled the card on the home cam again this weekend, a few photos are below. An update from my previous post, Cuddeback received the camera that I sent back to them and quickly determined that it was just plain defective. They sent me a brand new unit immediately which I got last Friday. Today I got a check in the mail from them, to reimburse what I spent shipping them the defective camera. I hadn't said anything about that or asked them to cover it, they did that on their own. They get top marks for their customer service in this instance. Once this heat breaks I'll get the new camera out, and maybe move a couple of the ones that are already out that aren't getting much action.

I also learned an important lesson about not shutting off the home camera, if you do you will need to visit every remote camera and manually reconnect them to the network. I already knew that from reading the manual, but that didn't stop me from doing it while I was in a hurry to swap the card. It made me appreciate not having to visit every camera to check images though, and spending over an hour walking around to all the cameras will definitely stick in my head now and make me more careful when swapping cards. It would be nice if the remote cameras would automatically search for and re-establish a connection to the home unit, maybe they can address that in a firmware patch at some point.