Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
The Amazon-owned Blink Mini 2 is a small, dainty smart home camera that packs a punch when it comes to features. There’s everything from two-way audio and activity zones, to person detection and scheduling on board.
Read: Blink Mini 2 vs Blink Mini
Some features like person detection require a subscription to the Blink Plus Plan, but unlike competitors including Ring and Nest, Blink doesn’t ask you to pay a monthly fee for activity zones. It means you can eliminate areas of your camera’s field of view so you don’t get a string of endless notifications. Here’s a step by step on how to set up activity zones on Blink Mini 2 and reduce unnecessary notifications.
What you’ll need
- The Blink app
- Your smartphone or tablet
The short version
- Open the Blink app.
- Tap on the three dots in the corner of the Blink Mini 2 camera feed.
- Tap on Device Settings.
- Select Motion Settings.
- Choose Motion Zones.
- Select the boxes on the photo you don’t want to be notified for.
Many smart home cameras offer activity zones but as we said, many put these behind a pay wall, including Nest. Blink does do activity zones in a slightly different way to others in that you don’t pin point a selection of dots that are then connected by lines with the inside of that shape consequently becoming your activity zone.
Instead, for the Blink Mini 2, you are presented with a still image of the camera’s field of view, which is divided into 64 rectangles. To create an Activity Zone, you tap on a rectangle to deactivate it. If a rectangle is grey, it is inactive and you will not be notified if anything happens in that space.
Blink also offers Privacy Zones but we will cover that off separately as it’s a slightly different process despite being in the same area of the Blink app. Here though, is a detailed step by step on how to create an activity zone on Blink Mini 2 and reduce your notifications to ensure you are only alerted to the areas that matter.
Time needed: 5 minutes
- Open the Blink app and head to device settings
The first thing you’ll need to do is open the Blink app, which probably won’t come as too much of a surprise. You’ll then need to tap on the three dots in the corner of your Blink Mini 2 feed. From here, you’ll see Device Settings in the pop up menu.
- Open up Motion Settings
Within Device Settings, you’ll see Motion Settings and within these, you’ll find Motion Zones in the next sub menu. You might also notice within Motion Settings that you can also adjust sensitivity, motion recording types and adjust the time after a motion event during which your Mini 2 camera will not detect motion.
- Create your activity zone
Once you tap on Motion Zone, you’ll see a snapshot of your camera’s field of view split into those 64 rectangular boxes we mentioned earlier. Tap on a rectangle to grey it out and create an inactive zone. You won’t be notified of any motion that happens within that inactive zone. Once you’ve finished selecting, make sure you tap ‘done’. If you need a bit more detail, you can tap on the Advanced tab at the bottom, which will zoom in on the rectangles and allow you to slide around the screen to make your selections.
That’s it! You should have finished creating your activity zone – or Motion Zone as Blink also calls it.
FAQs
All Blink cameras offer activity zones. There is an advanced activity zone option however, which allows you allows you to zoom into the thumbnail for more precise zone selection. This is only available on the Mini 2, Outdoor 4, Wired Floodlight, Indoor and Outdoor (3rd Gen), and XT2 cameras.
