Minimal battery drainage

[mesistostefre]

Ok, I setup neolink to properly connect to my cam and deliver the RTSP stream to home assistant.

I disable surveillance when at home. When disabled I'd like to shutdown the cam as much as possible and have neolink "just" report the battery status. I need that status to trigger a recharge ...

Trying to figure out the neolink setting that best supports this use model, but I still see the battery gets drained over time (like 10 hours) without delivering any stream.
In that use model, I have "neolink mqtt ... " running as a service continuously. (Otherwise I'd get the battery level just for a few mins ...)

Any idea how I can further reduce battery usage?

[[cameras]]
name = "Terrasse"
username = "xxx"
password = "yyy"

uid = "someuid"
[cameras.pause]
on_motion = true
on_client = true
timeout = 2.1
[cameras.mqtt]
server = "anotherip"
port = 1883
credentials = ["someuser", "somepassowrd"]
[cameras.mqtt.discovery]
topic = "homeassistant"
features = ["battery"]
enable_motion = false
enable_preview = false

[QuantumEntangledAndy]

I don't think there is anything else we can do. The battery is being used by the network card. To maintain a connection requires about 20 packets of data per second.

Your best bet might be to script the mqtt client to shutdown and reconnect every x mins

[mesistostefre]

All good, thanks a lot.

With your proposal to shutdown the MQTT client and reconnect: for this, it would be nice if the MQTT message would have the "retain" flag set to "True". Without it, the battery sensor will go "unavailable" between updates ... nothing you can do in HA and really needs to be set by the MQTT sender. ;-)

[QuantumEntangledAndy]

If all your after is the battery info have you considered running

neolink battery --config=tomlfile.toml camname

then uploading the infomation into mqtt yourself?

[mesistostefre]

Ha! I did not spot that "battery" argument. Likely because I'm on 0.5.16 ... :-/

Anyways: Sounds really promising, will upgrade and give it a try. Thanks a lot.

Actually -V reports there are a lot more command line arguments available. I understood the docs in a way that "rtsp", "mqtt" and "image" are available.
Maybe worth a thought to mention the other options explicitly as command line options in the doc ...

[mesistostefre]

Quickly installed 0.5.18, configured "print_format = "Xml" in the .toml and ran the "neolink battery --config=tomlfile.toml camname" command.

I do receive a lengthy response, basically a fairly large Xml doc with the whole camera information. Some " were escaped to \" and there are loads of \n. In addition the XML doc was preceeded with the text "Payload Txt: ".

I'll get rid of these extra chars and apply some xpath filtering to get the batteryLevel extracted. Once done I'll curl an MQTT message to home assistant.