How to Turn Any Camera into a Wi-Fi Camera

How to turn any camera into a Wi-Fi camera

Imagine the following situation: you need to set up video surveillance around the perimeter of a country house, installing four outdoor cameras — one on each of the building's four walls. We'll explain how to solve this with the smallest possible number of cable connections.

The classic approach: a LAN connection

The standard way to set up video surveillance is to connect each individual camera to the router with twisted-pair cable (via a PoE switch). Ideally, the cabling should be taken care of in advance: providing the outlets, laying the wiring and preparing a centralized connection point during construction. Or else these jobs have to be tackled right before the surveillance system goes live.

An alternative is to convert any wired camera to a Wi-Fi setup by adding just one component, which we'll cover below.

How do you turn any wired camera into a Wi-Fi camera?

Any computer store sells what's known as a Wi-Fi signal extender — a compact device that plugs into a standard household socket. The accessory's job is to extend the range of a wireless internet connection, but in the case of video surveillance it can be used differently: to convert the Wi-Fi signal into a classic wired connection. Setups like this are often called mesh systems.

The signal extender becomes part of the connection scheme: it receives the Wi-Fi network from the router and then passes it on to the camera over a standard LAN cable.

With the cable, the individual camera is connected not to the router but to the signal extender (via a PoE injector). The device, in turn, communicates with the router "over the air" via Wi-Fi: the whole arrangement is extremely compact and can be placed near where the camera is installed. The number of extenders in this setup should match the number of cameras in use. This removes the need for long LAN cables and for running them through the house.

The user's main task is to find an extender model that comes with a LAN port. A list of possible models, which can be bought in practically any computer store:

• TP-LINK TL-WA855RE
• TP-Link RE315
• Xiaomi Mi WiFi Range Extender AC1200
• Keenetic Buddy 6 KN-3411

There's no need to run wiring around the entire perimeter of the house: it's enough to bring a LAN cable into the building and connect it to a Wi-Fi signal extender powered from the nearest socket. Setting up video surveillance without pre-installed infrastructure becomes far simpler.

What to watch out for

Putting a scheme like this together involves no particular difficulties — the approach is well suited to doing yourself at home. There are, however, a few recommendations worth knowing:

Once the system is up and running, check the stability of the connection. Installing the Wi-Fi signal extender too far from the router can lead to intermittent connection loss, which shows up on the timeline in the Faceter app as corresponding markers.

For the Wi-Fi signal extender to work properly, the device has to be connected to the router and configured beforehand. As a rule, the process is straightforward and takes no more than 5 minutes — just follow the manufacturer's instructions.

You don't need to choose an expensive extender model to get the job done: even the cheapest model at 1,500 rubles handles the task perfectly well.

Conclusions

Any wired Faceter camera can be connected to a router over Wi-Fi: extenders with a LAN port are what make this possible. And if the surveillance is being used indoors rather than outside, choose the Faceter Mini M1: this device connects to the router directly without wires, and setup takes literally a couple of minutes.