The Chemist: March 2021

Tired of trucking up and down a ladder to charge your battery-operated Wifi security cameras, yeah I was to so let’s get smart and do something about it.

In today’s DIY video I’m going to show you how I took this manual process and automated the task for just a few dollars and purchase it from Amazon, and finally rid myself of this nuisance task, once and for all.

Back Story

Within recent months, my quiet Montclair townhome community had seen a large increase in the number of thieving individuals walking the grounds in the early morning hours. These individuals, who seem to come in teams, were caught on neighbors' home security cameras numerous times rummaging through our mailboxes, checking cars doors, stealing catalytic converters, and rummaging through our trash bins all while unsuspecting homeowners slept.

The activity had gotten so bad that I had become afraid to let my wife open our garage door without me being present as she and the kids left at O'Dark thirty hours to the grandparents’ house and then work, Just the thought of the possibilities of what could happen if she one morning opened that door and startled an unsuspecting thief, or worse, fell victim to home an invasion constantly ran through my mind.

Month after month new footage from homeowners began to arise demonstrating just how bad things were getting and seemingly just how important the need for my cameras to stay in operation.

Me and my wife found ourselves looking and the camera's more often than not. Every time a camera sent an alert, there we were, scrutinizing each piece of footage looking for someone hiding in a dark corner or low light shadow, and if that wasn't bad enough, we would then turn to the live camera view, hoping to catch a criminal in the act.

As you can imagine this sort of activity recked havoc on the battery life of my eufy cameras and I found myself running up and down the ladder removing my cameras to charge them more times than I would like. At the time of this video, eufy hadn't released their solar panel charger, and to be honest, this wasn't an option because my HOA has strict rules about mounting anything to the exterior of our homes.

This is where I started toying with the notion of creating a low-profile, extended length USB cable that I could just route to each of my high traffic cameras that we were constantly viewing and connect them to a wall outlet just as I did when charging them. But even plugging them in required some effort and if I was going to go through all the effort of fabricating a charging system then I wanted to ensure I took as much of the manual labor out from the task and possibly and have it remotely controlled, whether if I was home, at work, or on vacation.