Ring founder and ‘chief inventor’ Jamie Siminoff explains in a blog post that customers frequently complain that even if they have multiple cameras, they often can’t see the view they want, such as to check if they left a window open.
The Always Home Cam solves this by flying around. It only records when flying, and the camera lens is blocked by the charging dock to ensure privacy.
The $250 device is basically a drone with enclosed propellers with a camera hanging underneath. It builds a map of your home and creates pre-set paths which it can fly along.
You also have full control over where it can and cannot fly in your home, and there’s obstacle avoidance so it doesn’t hit anything when navigating those paths.
It can’t be manually controlled and in normal use, it will fly to the room in which a connected Ring Alarm sensor had been triggered, then fly back to the dock after recording the video evidence.
You can see the live video feed after getting the alert from the alarm system in the Ring app. You can see how it works in the video below.
Amazon, which owns Ring, says that the device hasn’t passed FCC regulations so may or may not ever go on sale. But we hope it does. It’s a genuinely great idea.
In the meantime, these are the best home security cameras to buy.