Eufy’s products have been on my radar for a while now, since they don’t require a subscription service. When this camera came up on sale for 40% off, I decided to get one to check out.

The S340 Solo Cam is a 802.11b/g/n WiFi, solar powered camera, with built in AI for detecting and tracking humans and cars primarily.

It’s a Pan/Tilt/Zoom dual camera system with 360 degree range of motion on the vertical axis, and just about 90 degree downward range.

On-board memory is limited to an 8GB circular buffer that holds the video of captured events (detections). It is not standalone expandable. If you want more storage than that, then you’d need to buy the HomeBase which provides an additional 16GB of storage, but is expandable via a hard drive that can be user installed. It also expands the AI capabilities, at least per the ad copy. I didn’t get one because it was additional money I didn’t want to spend. You can also do a subscription to the Eufy cloud service, if you want.

All communications with the S340 occur via the Eufy security app. This was a bit of a bummer, but not unexpected. I was hoping i could use my NAS to store video directly, but nah, its all thru the app and the Eufy ecosystem.

The app does what is needs to do fairly painlessly. It is annoying though, how much it tries to upsale you on the services and other devices. During camera setup, you do need to turn on your phone’s location service. Eufy claims its to set you up on servers in your local area and country. It works fine after setup if location tracking is turned off.

It seems to be pretty standard p2pcam setup, where the camera sends the data to server farms (AWS), which then forward the video feed to your phone. Since the data is going through third party servers, it is possible that your feed could be stored and/or be accessible to local law enforcement agencies, but I have no way to confirm that.

Basic traffic monitoring shows that all traffic does seem to be encrypted with https v1.2 and going to “local” third party servers, except the app does make a https connection to China based Tencent servers during setup. I haven’t noticed the making any connections though (big difference from the Hello Birdie camera which sent everything to China servers). So it does at least superficially seem that Eufy is taking security and privacy at least half way seriously. In any case, I set my camera up on a dedicated WiFi router that is on its own isolated subnet, as to protect the rest of my system (Fresh Tomato router firmware FTW!).

That’s all for now. More to come later on the internals and traffic snooping.