Four Smart Uses for Your Cam Jack

Nest Cam is an easy to use security camera for everyone. However, if you have one lying around, you can use it much more than to deter criminals. Here are some unusual but useful things you can do with the Nest Cam.

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Track the delivery of parcels

Amazon may give you an alarm tracker that will let you know when your package will arrive, but you’ll be more comfortable delivering expensive items to your door if you see it for yourself. Point the Nest Cam outside the door and you can see when your packages will arrive. Once it’s found, you can test your camera from work to make sure it’s safe, not damaged, or stolen.

You can also set up Nest Cam to send you notifications when motion is detected (for example, when your package is being delivered). Open the Nest app and turn on notifications in settings. You can only send notifications when you are not at home or at any time. Subscribers who pay for Nest Aware can even set up Activity Zones to monitor a specific part of the camera for movement. If you want to make sure your stuff doesn’t sit longer than necessary, this is incredibly handy.

Keep track of your pets

You love your adorable little furball, but every hour you’re away from home (and half aren’t), you know they can ruin something. Or pee on something. Or there is something they are going to wake up later. You may not be able to stop everything they are doing, but at least you will feel better when you know when it is happening or what animal has destroyed it. Nest Cams can help with this.

While you are at work or on vacation, Nest Cams can show you live that your pets are in your home. You can also view snapshots of recorded video whenever motion is detected no earlier than three hours in advance. However, if you subscribe to Nest Aware, you can view up to 30 days of video history. This should give you a lot of evidence to figure out if Fido, Fluffy or War Machine is destroying your throw pillows.

Talk to your kids while you’re away

You may not need to start a conversation with someone who is trying to break into your home. However, if you have a Nest Cam indoors, you are more likely to catch your kids throwing things into the house or sneaking into the liquor locker. If this happens, you can use the speaker on the Nest Cam to talk to people in your home, just to let them know you’re listening.

When you sign in to watch your camera video on the web or mobile app, you see a microphone button. Click on this (or press and hold on your phone) and you will be able to speak through the camera in your home. The speaker quality isn’t that great, but it’s enough to convey a simple «I wouldn’t do that» to kids so they know you’re watching.

Use your camera as a motion detector for other smart gadgets

Nest Cams wouldn’t cost much if they weren’t smarter than a regular webcam. Fortunately, they are. As we mentioned earlier, the Nest camera can notify you when it detects sound or motion. You can also use this trigger to control all the other smart gadgets in your home using IFTTT and its powerful big brother Stringify.

The Nest Cam IFTTT channel and Nest Stringify Thing can use the detected motion or sound from Nest as triggers to automate them (and Stringify can also be activated with Nest’s people detection feature). You can use this trigger to turn on your living room lights when you get home, record every suspicious movement or sound from a security camera, or even simulate a dog barking through your Sonos speaker to scare someone away. Sure, the latter might sound like overkill, but if you want to make your home as smart as possible, you can do a lot more with the Nest Cam than just look through it.