Why buy several gadgets when the guts are the same?

That’s a pretty great take on how our electronics should serve us, though it comes with several major caveats — mostly that you end up having to spend more money on accessories to live that dream. Also, that removing your home security camera from your house means it’s no longer doing what you bought it for, and that there are inevitably compromises you’ll have to live with compared to dedicated gadgets for each type of activity. But more on that later.

You might have heard the Flir name before from a $249.99 phone case the company has been shopping around that lets you see live thermal images with a special app. It was very neat, but arguably impractical for people who were not looking for temperature leaks around their house, or to reenact the best scenes from Predator. That phone case also wasn’t Flir’s first product. In fact, it’s a company that makes a good chunk of sales from very high-end camera systems that are used by the military, at airports, and at international borders. It’s also the same company that makes the Lorex brand of security cameras, which are mainly aimed at small businesses. All that is to say that this is not some new Kickstarter project from some unknown.

If your Wi-Fi or power goes out, it can fill in the gaps

What you get with the FX, which starts at $199 and goes up for preorders today, is a modular camera with 1080p resolution and a 160-degree viewing angle. Like other casual home monitoring cameras, it’s equipped with 802.11 b/g/n home Wi-Fi to stream video up into the cloud, a speaker and microphone for two-way conversations, and infrared LEDs that help it see about 30 feet in the dark. There's also a microSD card slot and an included 8GB memory card to store video when you're using it to capture footage on the go. Where things get interesting is that there's a built-in two-hour battery in both the camera and its detachable stand. Combined, that means you get about four hours of battery life and video recording if your power goes out. When it comes back on, the system automatically uploads that footage to the cloud, so you don’t have a gap in your recordings. You can also connect directly to the FX to download footage or change settings when it’s running off batteries alone.

Flir has built in a fairly simple way to trigger what gets recorded and what doesn’t, using a mix of sound, temperature, and motion alerts. Using the Flir FX app for iOS or Android (which is currently the only way to set up and view footage until a web viewer is released later this year), you can check off the boxes you want to track motion in, like doors, windows, or specific objects in your house. Flir’s system is not as advanced as Dropcam’s, which lets you create multiple zones using such a system, each of which can have their own alert rules.