The Backed Pack: Butterfleye flutters past wires, can keep an eye on anything, anywhere

Each week our friends at Backerjack highlight a successfully crowdfunded gadget. This week, we look at Butterfleye, a wire-free monitoring camera that has raised four times its funding goal in the first four days of its second crowdfunding go-round.

There’s been an explosion of new home security cameras on the market in the past few years, but whether they are attached to some kind of monitoring service or rely on their own apps, they are less convenient to install than they could be. While many of them happily hop onto a Wi-Fi network, they can’t stray too far from an outlet.

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Butterfleye combines a wide-angle lens with a big battery to keep it going up to a week without charging. It employs sophisticated sensors that go beyond simple motion detection to include sound detection; it can also differentiate between humans and pets. The company claims it has additional improvements in accurate identification technology on the way and says that it plans to deliver these via regular firmware updates. Going along with the prevailing model these days, the service includes limited cloud storage of video the Butterfleye captures and offers the option of additional storage for a monthly fee. The company’s app allows users to swipe between multiple Butterfleye cameras.

Since its initial campaign last year, the San Francisco-based company has toned down the non-security selfie applications of its camera and is instead focusing on the camera’s ability to wirelessly safeguard your home for up to a week without needing a charge. The company seeks to raise $100,000 by August 25th in a Flexible Funding campaign to help with the tooling process. It’s offering a number of limited tiers, with a baseline price of $199 for a single unit.

The Butterfleye is ideal for situations that require surveillance stints of a few days, particularly outdoors (as in camping trips). The company claims its low-light performance exceeds that of the iPhone 6 and says it has plans to further improve nighttime video capture.

Netgear also offers a wireless camera system that claims long battery life with its Arlo system, previously known as the Avaak Vue. Like the Arlo, the Butterfleye uses a magnetic mount that allows for a fair degree of range. Due to the Butterfleye’s heavier size, mounting it requires something sturdier than the Arlo mount’s light adhesive.  However, one reason the Arlo cameras are so small is that they use a proprietary wireless communication method. That requires a base station that must be plugged in at all times (and potentially requires an extender as well).

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