Not that long ago, Piper was one of many projects looking for crowdfunding, hoping to get off the ground with help from the general public rather than professional investors. The project, from Ottawa, Ontario-based Icontrol Networks, ended up making three times its funding goal. Now, only five months later, Piper has actually launched at a price of $239 (direct from GetPiper.com). Launching at retail is unique enough for a crowd-funded piece of hardware. That Piper is as polished as it is, and does so much, is a very happy surprise. This device gives our Editors' Choice surveillance camera, the Dropcam Pro($299.99 at Amazon), some serious competition without any extra fees—except what you'd pay to extend its abilities with an almost infinite number of Z-Wave-based home automation sensors that monitor doors, windows, outlets, and more.

Editors' Note: This product was originally called the Blacksumac Piper. Icontrol Networks has acquired Blacksumac and has retired the use of the brand name; we have updated the review to reflect the new product name, which is otherwise identical.

Design and Setup
Piper isn't the sveltest camera around, but it gets a pass on that since it does more than house a lens and Wi-Fi chip. It comes in either black or white and measures 5.5 by 3.5 by 2-inches (HWD) alone; it gains about a half inch in height when clipped to the easily removed metal stand. It also comes with a wall or ceiling mount that doesn't afford any movement flexibility, so be sure to get the placement right the first time. The front sports a motion detector, status LED, microphone hole, and the fish-eye wide-angle camera lens. Piper takes three AA batteries to serve as backup if the power goes out. The screw holding the battery compartment requires a sturdy-yet-tiny Philips screwdriver, the kind you'd use for eyeglasses. Removing and not losing that screw was the hardest part of the setup.

To setup Piper, listen for the device itself to say in a lady's English accent, "Piper is ready." Download the mobile app, currently only available for iOS (an Android app is promised for February 2014), create an account, and the app will tell you to connect the iPhone directly to Piper, which broadcasts its own Wi-Fi network name. Switch back to the app and it handles setting up the camera on your account and on your home network. It's not as straight-forward as supporting industry-standard Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), but at least it also gets the Piper device registered with the Piper account with no extra hassle.

You'll find no extra ports on the Piper beyond the AC power—no Ethernet, for example. It connects wirelessly only, via Wi-Fi and Z-Wave, to other devices. Users interact with Piper strictly via smartphone or tablet. In fact, there's no provision as yet for accessing your Piper account or devices over the Web. Icontrol says that's on the roadmap.

Features and Performance
Piper as a camera is pretty great. The lens shows a full 180-degrees, more than Dropcam Pro's 130 degrees, previously the widest I'd seen in a home surveillance cam. Like the Dropcam Pro, Piper also delivers 1080p (1,920-by-1,080 pixel) quality streaming video using the h.264 format. Both cameras eschew the mechanical pan and tilt found in models like the D-Link DCS-5020L($111.85 at Walmart). Instead, they employ advanced optics and wide-angles to take in the entire room and let you digitally zoom, then virtually "pan/tilt" around by swiping a finger on the zoomed image.

With the 180-degree lens, zooming all the way out with Piper gives you a true fish-eye look, with the image reduced to a disc on the screen of the phone. But the zoom-in view is truly amazing; it looks sharp and shows detail right up to the 10x limit (Dropcam only goes up to 8x digital zoom). Piper's zoomed image is as ultra-responsive as Dropcam Pro's. Piper throws in an extra view, however: a quad-split of the camera, so you can zoom in on multiple parts of room at the same time.

Where Icontrol dropped the ball is in the lighting, or lack thereof: Piper has no infra-red LEDs to provide night vision. That's a true shame, as even the cheapest of home surveillance cameras out there, such as the $99 D-Link Cloud Camera 1150($80.50 at Amazon), include enough LEDs to give at least a hint of what's happening in the pitch dark. As you enter the gloaming, Piper's view of a room goes way downhill. Keep this in mind if you've got plans for Piper to sit where it isn't well lit.

Piper picks the ball back up and runs with it by integrating a number of sensors. The camera housing constantly measures the "Vitals" of the room, including temperature, brightness, sound, and motion. Because your location is listed with your Piper account, the app also tracks the outside temp and humidity.

Internal sensors are nice, but the external Z-Wave sensor options are the major tool in Piper's playbook. You can buy Piper with a "Z-Wave Pack" with three external sensors for $359—and that's really the only way you should buy Piper. You can also buy any of the four Z-Wave sensors Piper currently supports (a $49.95 door/window opening sensor, $59.95 smart switch for an outlet, a $49.95 micro smart switch you can wire right into outlets and wall switches in your home, and a $39.95 Z-Wave range extender) directly. There are many, many more Z-Wave products in the wild, so expect more of them to get support on Piper in the future. Connecting the external sensors to Piper is a simple matter using the iOS app.

Once you have installed a few sensors, Piper become a full home automation hub you can control with a smartphone or tablet. You create rules based on events like motion detection, sound detection, and temperature changes, which are in turn based on whether you're home, away, or on vacation. You have to manually tell the Piper app if you're home or away, as it doesn't track your phone's location, which would be a nice option.

Actions Piper can perform for each trigger event include recording video (up to 1,000 video clips); sending a notification to you or others in a trusted circle via text, email, phone call, or push from the Piper app; and/or emitting one of the most shrill, ear-piercing sirens I've ever been subjected to. Save the siren for absolute emergencies when you're traveling and there's no dogs in the abode. Thankfully, the Piper Options in the app include a siren lockout: You can set it to never turn on if desired.

Note that 1,000-video-clip limit. At 25-seconds each, that's just short of seven hours of online video. You can watch a clip all you want, but you can't download it, and once you get to 1,000, Piper starts over-writing the oldest clips. That's not exactly up to the same standards as Dropcam Pro's cloud-based recording where for just $9.95 a month you get a 7-day buffer of video to fast-forward and rewind to your heart's content, saving clips as you go. But 7 hours isn't bad considering it's only triggered by events and doesn't cost a dime extra on Piper's already higher price. Hopefully Icontrol will put full cloud-recording and clip downloads on the roadmaps well.

Hooking up a Z-Wave sensor supported by Piper gives you even more Action options. For example, Icontrol sent a smart switch to try with Piper. I set it to automatically turn on when Piper sees the room is dark (which doesn't really negate my sadness about the lack of infra-red LEDs) and shut off after 4 hours. The security settings also can use the smart switch—for example, it could detect motion, sound, or temperature changes and activate the light attached to the switch. The door/window sensor creates its own event, noticing when it's open or shut. The combinations are almost infinite, and there's no limit to the number of Z-Wave devices you can connect; they just have to be Piper-supported.

Conclusions
I had low expectations for Piper, but I've been burned by crowd-funded products in the past. This one exceeded my expectations in almost every way—the camera quality, the setup ease, the app itself, recording of clips to the cloud, and the array of sensors that would make a Starfleet science officer proud. It doesn't quite unseat Dropcam Pro as our Editor's Choice, as it is still missing key things like night vision, the Android app, desktop-Web viewing, and video clip saving. Plus, the price is a little high, especially because you need extra-cost Z-Wave sensors to take full advantage. Dropcam itself has some home automation plans in the future, but on the Bluetooth LE side, not Z-Wave. It'll certainly be interesting to see how they duke it out in the future.

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