My SIMCAM AI camera experience

Hello everyone

In April 2020 I was looking for a smart home security camera ("next-gen CCTV") that do not depend (fully) on any cloud service and after a brief market research I chosen 2 different models from Chinese company SIMCAM.io based in Wuhan that was unknown to me:

• SimCam Alloy - Outdoor AI Security Camera - model SC-AI02-1 - bought for $109
  
• SimCam 1S - Indoor AI Security Camera - model SC-AI01 - bought for $129

My first experience was good - their installation & setup was easy and done with help of simple Android application installed on my smartphone which was named SIMCAM (com.simtoo.aicamera).

I didn't need at that time any centralization via the NAS storage or RTSP Streaming. 

All videos were recorded locally onto the SD card and both cameras were able to make their archive accessible via the mobile app. And AI detection of people worked well, resulting in mobile app notifications that were pointing to the video recordings.

This took an unexpected twist approx in August 2020 when I noticed there's new camera firmware available for an update which I like to do to get rid of bugs and security vulnerabilities.

After the firmware installation (aka update) I learnt that a must replace the mobile application with the brand new SIMHOME (com.simshine.aiot) which aims to provide the same functionality but supports a broader range of company "smart home" products. Unfortunately, it broke the camera alerts functionality. They keep appearing, but related video recordings are not accessible in my case. Such result is worse than not having any security camera - I get the alert via SIMHOME app but cannot check remotely what has happened there. That's really frustrating.

So I decided to move video recordings onto the Synology NAS for which a brief guideline exist here how to do the setup. What's is unfortunately not mentioned there is that:

• If NAS storage is configured cameras will start putting there a continuous video record, not just the "video alerts" triggered by motion detection ("AI"), which is impractical in my case.
  
• It seems that SIMCAMs require NAS to support a legacy and insecure SMB protocol version 1 (aka SMB1) for "Windows File Sharing" service and use "direct hosting of SMB over TCP/IP" based on usage of TCP port 445. While SMB version 2 and 3 are the best practice nowadays.
  
• The SIMHOME app or SIMCAMs sometimes forget the NAS settings so you need to keep an eye on it
  
• The SIMHOME or SIMCAMs requires the NAS Shared Folder path to be written with slash ("/") characters instead of the backslashes ("\") typically used in Windows realm and required by the same looking Universal Naming Convention (UNC)
• so ensure you enter something like "//192.168.1.2/video/cam1"

That led me to a decision, to try offset video recording & alerting functionality via the RTSP Streaming to Synology Surveillance Station SW installed on the NAS device to check to find out if it can run in parallel with embedded (local) functionality. I'll let you know soon this way.

Regards,

SnY