Review
BabbyCam is an advanced baby monitor that offers features not seen on any other baby monitors today. Below is a personal review that goes into more details of BabbyCam.
Opening the BabbyCam box, I was immediately greeted with the long 13.4 inch camera neck. The clamp is tight and easily handles a stationary crib scene. The 720p HD camera isn't the prettiest looking but what do I care, I drive a minivan.
The camera comes with a USB cord that is over 15 feet long. It's enough to stretch across any large room, so if you don't have many outlets this is great.
Here's a bookshelf I attached the camera to next to our baby's playpen.
The setup is quick. BabbyCam connects to your WIFI network only on the stronger 2.4GHz frequency and allows you to watch the video stream directly from your cable modem. Most IP cameras send your stream to an outside server, so if you are worried about privacy, your choices are limited. BabbyCam doesn't do that. Right out of the box, nothing is shared with the outside world. BabbyCam can also run solely on your home network, which means it keeps chugging along even when your internet goes down.
This is the brains of BabbyCam. It's a small white module that houses a Raspberry Pi 3.
Software is important because it's what you interact with on a day to day basis, but camera apps are usually hit or miss. Dropcam/Nest do a good job with their app. Samsung not so much. Here's me trying to load my Samsung SlowCam (sorry Samsung, I'm impatient so extra seconds and tapping drive me nuts):
Performance is king. BabbyCam is faster and requires just one tap to get to your baby. The video and sound have very low latency and the menus load instantly. Since it feels so lightweight and snappy, I find myself launching it more often to check on my baby. I recommend adding a bookmark to the home screen on your phone for quick access.
Watching a machine watch your baby is fascinating. The percentage displayed is how confident BabbyCam is, so higher percentages mean BabbyCam is sure of what it sees. Setting up the camera to have a good view of your baby's face is super important. To improve the accuracy, you can enable the deep learning checkbox in Settings.
BabbyCam is like an over-protective parent that you can turn on and off. There's a 15 minute limit for each alert. So if you get a crying alert, you won't get another one until 15 minutes later if your baby is still crying. This way you don't get bombarded by alerts every second. Our doctor warned us against stomach sleeping so I used the face covered alert liberally until our baby could roll over by herself. After she learned to roll, she constantly sleeps on her stomach so I disabled the alert.
BabbyCam analyzes images, video, and sound to generate accurate alerts. "Face covered" means BabbyCam sees a baby's head but cannot clearly see the nose or mouth. The sound alert activates only when it sees a baby. My baby sleeps with a white noise sound machine and it triggers when she cries so it works the way it should. The sleeping alert is activated when the baby transitions from a non-sleep state to a sleep state. Since the baby will spend the majority of time sleeping in the crib, BabbyCam doesn't want to keep alerting you throughout the night. Thank God, I need my sleep.
BabbyCam can typically store 2 to 4 months of history with no monthly fees. BabbyCam has an algorithm to remove duplicate image data so you don't have to scroll through hours of an empty crib. I don't understand why all baby monitors don't come with history since the baby spends so much time in the crib unsupervised. Other baby monitors that do have history make it inconvenient to access (take out SD card and manually copy) or make you pay monthly fees.
The best camera is the one you have with you. It's easy to share your BabbyCam pictures. In Android, by pressing and holding on the History image, you can share it via Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Line, Insert-Your-Favorite-Social-Media-Platform...
The charts are useful to get a glimpse of what your baby's sleeping schedule looks like. You can save the charts as a PNG, JPEG, SVG, or PDF file. As a groggy parent, all the days seem to meld together and it's hard to keep track of how much sleep my baby has actually been getting.
Without a doubt, BabbyCam has made parenting easier and allowed me to worry less. Imagine knowing the exact minute of when your baby wakes up or how long your baby has been crying in the crib. The camera clamp makes it easy to move as your baby's life expands around your home. The history viewer makes it fun to catch memorable moments and wonder why your baby is awake at 3am just chillin' in the crib.
Through deep learning, BabbyCam has become so accurate I rarely need to watch the baby monitor video. I just let BabbyCam do all the watching for me.