Can you also test with rechargeable 2300m batteries? I have one of mine on it.
Keep in mind that doing a ālot of thingsā with the camera in a short period of time causes the battery voltage to drop. If if you give it an hour or so to ārecoverā the voltage will bounce back. The right time to check the battery level would be to do a forceSensorRefresh after about an hour of not doing anything. If you suddenly took 10 pictures or started a video stream it would cause a temporary drop in the voltage/battery levels.
As for forceSensorRefresh, it does cause the camera to wake up so it will impact the battery, just how much I canāt say but you can try it out and let us know what you see. My guess it if youāre doing it every 30 minutes it wonāt be much.
EDIT: Also keep in mind that our algorithm is tuned for Lithium batteries, Alkalines have a different discharge curve and may last longer than they appear because the voltage curves are different. Alkaline batteries lose 90% of their power at 1v where as Lithiumās lose them at about 1.3v. Again this is an ongoing experiment so weāll fine tune the algorithm as we collect more data from test and get feedback from this forum. So yes please send in your results. When does your camera die and what the battery level it shows when it dies.
How are they doing?
I have just inserted the https://www.amazon.com/Energizer-Recharge-Rechargeable-Batteries-Pre-Charged/dp/B00000J47L/ref=pd_bxgy_121_img_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=VCNTZH19PJBRQMPGQ649&th=1
Will keep you updated.
These are 1.2v batteries. I would be very interested in seeing how long they last before the camera circuit shuts down (low voltage) or they just run out. With 1.2v your blink DH will likely show 0% battery due to the calibration we have put so I wouldnāt rely on that when using these batteries. But Iām curious how they do perform. It would be a great input for us.
These are nickle metal hydride batteries that run at a lower voltage. It would be real cool if these would work over a long period of time. I tend to think they wonāt however.
Well the main issue with NiMH batteries are that they lose about 10-15% of the charge at room temp and as high as 90% at 70C every 30 days. So even though 2300mah sounds good it only works well if used in a short period of time say 6 months or less. The self discharge itself would be close to 60+% in NiMH batteries over 6 months. NiMH are great for high energy over short periods, however Blink being a low energy product would require a battery with a very low self discharge property (like Lithium or Alkaline).
By the way, temperature impacts the discharge curve also. I always suspected Blink included temperature in their unit for a more accurate battery reading. Of course they arenāt designed for outdoor use, so my theory probably doesnāt hold. Yet, Lithium batteries handle temperature extremes better than any other practical solution.
Unless you get the newer ālow self-dischargeā NiMH batteries. Unfortunately, it isnāt always easy to tell which are low self-discharge and no industry standard spec us consumers can compare. The Energizer batteries @lmosenko is using say they are āminimized self-dischargeā with two year shelf life. Alkaline are five to ten and Lithum are ten to twenty years.
The low self-discharge battery studied the most is Eneloop whose five year claim has been substantiated which puts it on the low end of Alkaline:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JHKSN76
However, since there is no standard, who is to say they change their chemistry or how it compares to other options. And how would Blink indicate which NiMH batteries to use?
So, though NiMH batteries have a shorter shelf life, the newer low self-discharge batteries may still be a practical option. It is a good sign that Blink works at all because of the lower nominal voltage.
Mine are back at 100% and it was forcerefreshed 20 minutes agoā¦
Actually, I think the cameras just needed to be on for 24 hours and the new firmware update gets pushed to them and the problem is resolved, Iāve had the same issue with my cameras when I first got them.
From the FAQ no 22:
@RBoy Is this something thats actually possible to do, and being worked on?
Not yet, weāve made requests to Blink to provide this feature but you should put the request into Blink customer support.
As ecstatic as I was by Arlo integration, this week I replaced my front door camera with Blink. I cannot be happier. I can actually see who is at the door in less than 30 seconds (from sound notification to actual video), whereas with Arlo, it would take nearly a minute. This is awesome!!! Oh and no more batteries to change every month. I plugged this little white box into a usb and I am done. Great little device with awesome integration. Thanks @rboy for all your work!
First of all @RBoy , thanks a lot for the effort you have done on this Blink solution.
Three things I have noticed that I canāt find covered i would like to inform about, and ask about.
First: When you have added a camera, it fails when you try to add it to a room until you have taken a picture with that camera in the smartapp.
Second: Pictures in the log from each camera is random it seems, and there is nothing that says it should have taken pictures, but it still shows up with new filenames and the picture is from the last picture taken manually.
Third: in Camera Armed and Motion Detected Actions, there is no lights available, and when you try to add lights/switches the icon for the ādeviceā is fussed up on some of them. See picture.
Regards
ST phone app problem, contact ST support nothing to do with the DH
Thatās the way it works, why bother about the filename anyways? It just generates a new filename everytime it pulls the image from the Blink server. Thatās the way ST likes it.
Nothing to do with the SmartApp, thatās an ST phone issue, please contact ST support. The icons for each device are set by their respective DHās. As for no lights I donāt understand what that means. The SmartApp just tells ST to show the user a list of all āswitchā devices they have installed in their account.
Thanks a lot for this information. A bit of a jungle the crossing app/st regarding what information is presented. Gues you spent some time figuring out this in the begining 
This smart app + core = I am in love.
The implement of blink as available unit in such av flexible way in core is a killer @RBoy