UniFi Camera Mount

Every UniFi camera ships with a wall plate that assumes a flat, solid, plumb surface to screw into. A house does not have many of those outside. Vinyl siding is a run of overlapping curves, a soffit is a thin hollow panel, and the one spot with the view you actually want is never the spot with a stud behind it. This is the adapter between the camera’s own plate and whatever you are really fixing it to.

The bracket geometry isn’t in this folder yet, so the page carries the pending flag. What is below is the part list and the install — which is the half that decides whether a camera stays up, stays dry and gives you usable night video.

Which camera you are mounting

Two UniFi cameras live on this network and they ask a bracket for completely different things.

The G6 Turret is the current one — 8 megapixel, 4K, outdoor, and one Ethernet run carries both its power and its video. Nothing about the bracket is hard; the cable is the whole job.

The G3-Micro is the old one — WiFi, indoor-rated, fed from a USB lead rather than PoE. It is a much smaller object and a much easier bracket, and a much worse idea outside, because “indoor” on a camera means the enclosure, not the optics.

	G6 Turret	G3-Micro
What reaches it	One outdoor-rated Cat cable	A USB power lead, plus WiFi
Bracket needs	A path for the cable through the plate, and a drip point below it	The same hole, smaller
Lives outside	Yes	Only under real cover

Whichever one you are holding, print an adapter, not a replica. Do not try to reproduce the camera’s own mounting interface in plastic — print a plate that the camera’s supplied bracket bolts flat onto, and let Ubiquiti’s part be the thing that touches the camera. A printed copy of somebody else’s ball joint is a part that creeps a few degrees every hot afternoon until the frame is all gutter.

Parts

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The camera

UniFi G6 Turret, 4K — 8 MP, colour, white, and it takes power over the Ethernet run, so there is one cable to get to the mount instead of two.
UniFi G3-Micro — the small wireless one, if what you want is a bracket for an indoor camera on an indoor wall. It is an older part and it is not weather-rated. Under a deep porch ceiling it survives; on an exposed wall it is a matter of time.
The recorder is whatever you already run Protect on. If you are adding a 4K camera to an existing one, add the disk at the same time — a 4 TB Skyhawk is a surveillance-rated drive built for a write stream that never stops, which is not what a desktop drive is for.

Getting network out to it

Outdoor Cat 7, 50 ft, direct burial — shielded, waterproof jacket, rated to be buried. This is the one bought twice here, and the reason is that the run is always longer than you measured. For a longer pull there is 100 ft of outdoor braided Cat 8. Do not run indoor patch cable outside; the jacket chalks and cracks in a couple of summers and the failure looks like a flaky camera, not a bad cable.
Gigabit PoE injector, 30 W, 802.3af/at — one camera, one injector, done. If you would rather do it properly at the rack, a UniFi Switch 8 60W powers the cameras and puts them on the same controller as everything else.
RJ45 crimper, tester and 100 plugs — you crimp the camera end after the cable is through the wall, because a moulded plug and boot need a far bigger hole than the bare jacket does.
Network tester with a PoE test — it tells you the pairs are right and that power is arriving, from the ground, before the ladder goes away.
Screw-down cable clips, 100-pack for a run along trim, and UV-resistant zip ties or screw-mount zip ties for everything else. Plain black nylon ties go brittle and let go after two seasons in the sun; the UV-rated ones are the same price.
Flat 16 ft micro-USB extension, 2-pack — only for the G3-Micro. It is flat enough to run under trim and comes with its own clips.

The mount

PETG, 1 kg — not PLA. See Print settings; this is the single decision on the page that will cost you the whole part if you get it wrong.
M2/M3/M4 stainless cap screws and nuts, 1080 pcs — stainless, specifically. The black alloy M3 kits everyone has in a drawer are grade 10.9 steel with a zinc flash, and they weep rust down white siding in about one winter.
M3 brass heat-set inserts, 100-pack — melt them into the bracket so the camera can come off and go back on more than twice. A screw driven straight into plastic gets one good bite and then you are reprinting.
#8 × 1-5/8 in exterior deck screws for going into wood, and a hollow-wall anchor assortment for the indoor camera on drywall.
Stud finder — a camera on a bracket on a lever arm is a surprising amount of moment on two screws. Find the framing.

Siding, if that is what you are mounting to

Vinyl siding hooks, 10-pack — sold literally for hanging a security camera on lap siding without drilling it. They hook the lip of a course and carry a small camera fine. They will not hold a bracket you can aim, and they do nothing about the cable.
Siding removal tool — a six-dollar hook that unzips one course of vinyl so you can get behind it. Trying to do this with a flat bar is how a panel ends up cracked, and vinyl that has been on a wall for ten years does not come off in cold weather at all.
Arlington siding mounting block with a built-in box — for 1/2 in double lap siding. This is the answer if you want the job to look like it was done by an electrician: a flat, plumb pad standing proud of the siding, with a sealed cavity behind it for the cable to come through.

Drilling and sealing

1 in × 17 in ship auger — it will reach through sheathing, a rim joist and whatever is behind it in one pass, which a spade bit will not.
Twist drill bit set — the split points do not walk on vinyl, which matters when the thing you are drilling is the outside of your house.
Exterior-grade sealant and a caulk gun — for the wall penetration and nothing else. Do not caulk the bracket to the wall.

Print settings

Setting	Value
Material	PETG
Layer height	0.2 mm
Walls	4 perimeters minimum
Infill	40%
Supports	Only where the model needs them
Orientation	Layers across the load, never along it

PETG, and it is not close. PLA softens at a temperature a sunlit wall reaches on an ordinary summer afternoon, and a bracket is a static load held for months. It does not snap. It droops, slowly, until the camera is looking at the driveway instead of the door and you assume something knocked it. PETG holds its shape in the sun and shrugs off UV far better. If the mount is in genuine full sun all day, ASA is better again, but it needs an enclosure and PETG is the sensible answer for most walls.

Walls before infill. A bracket fails at a corner in tension, not in the middle, so four perimeters buys more than raising infill to 60% and costs less time. What you are guarding against is the layer line splitting, which is why orientation matters more than either number: print the part so the arm’s load pushes across the layers rather than trying to peel them apart.

Running the cable

Do this first, all of it, before the bracket goes anywhere near the wall. The mounting screws are ten minutes; the cable is the afternoon.

Pick the spot from the picture, not from the wall. Hold the camera up on a stick and look at the live view on your phone before you drill anything. Every camera on this house ended up somewhere other than where it was going to go.
Drill from inside out where you can. You control where the hole lands in the stud bay, and a hole that misses framing from inside is a hole you can move; a hole that hits framing from outside is a hole in your siding forever. Angle it slightly upward as you go in, so the exit is lower than the entry and water cannot run the bore.
Pull the cable bare. No plug on the outside end. Push it through, then crimp the plug on once it is out in the open where you can see the pair order.
Leave a service loop. A metre coiled in the wall cavity or the attic. The day you re-terminate a crimp that has gone bad, or move the camera 300 mm along the wall, that loop is the difference between a ten-minute job and pulling a new run.
Form a drip loop at the camera. The cable should hang below the entry point and come back up to it. Water runs down a jacket, and a drip loop is where it leaves. This is the single most-skipped step in every camera install and the one that kills cameras two winters later.
Test the run from the ground — pairs and PoE both — before the ladder goes away and before you seal anything.
Seal the penetration, not the bracket. Sealant around where the cable enters the wall. The bracket itself should stay unsealed so anything that gets behind it can get back out.

A PoE injector has an in port and an out port, and they are not the same. The one marked for the network goes to the switch; the one carrying power goes to the camera. Reversed, nothing is damaged and nothing works, and you will spend twenty minutes blaming the crimp. Check the labels before you climb.

Getting it onto vinyl siding

Three approaches, in increasing order of how much you will like it in five years.

Siding hooks. No holes at all — they hook over the lip of a course and hang whatever you screw to them. Fastest, reversible, and fine for a small light camera. The catch is that they carry the camera and not the cable, so you still have to solve the wall penetration some other way, and there is nothing rigid about the result: a hooked bracket rocks in wind, and a 4K sensor shows you every bit of it.

A printed pad that follows the siding profile. This is the interesting option and the reason this project exists — a printed block whose back face is the negative of one lap and whose front face is flat and plumb. It is one part, it looks deliberate, and it puts the load on the sheathing behind rather than on the vinyl. There is a Vinyl Mounting Block project here that is exactly that shape for exactly this reason.

A proper siding mounting block with a box behind it. The Arlington part in the list above. It is the option a professional would use, it costs less than a spool of filament, and the built-in box means the cable crosses from outside to inside within a sealed cavity rather than at a hole you caulked and hoped about. Print the camera bracket to bolt onto its flat face and the whole siding profile stops being something you have to model.

Aim it, then leave it alone

Point it at what you want to identify, not at everything. A 4K sensor spread across a whole front yard is a wide shot of a person-shaped smudge; the same sensor covering a driveway apron reads a licence plate. Two narrow views beat one wide one every time, and that is why people end up buying a second camera rather than a higher-resolution first one.

Night video is what the bracket ruins. The camera’s infrared ring lights up whatever is nearest, and if that is the underside of your bracket, a white soffit, or a spider’s web across the lens, the sensor stops down for that bright object and the actual scene goes black. Keep the bracket entirely behind the lens plane, stand the camera off any pale surface, and never mount an IR camera looking through glass or a screen — you get a picture of the glass.

Troubleshooting

The camera never comes up. Injector ports reversed, or you are past the PoE budget — the US-8-60W has 60 W for all of its powered ports between them, and a 4K camera with the IR ring on at night draws considerably more than it does at noon. A camera that works all day and drops at dusk is a power problem, not a network one.

The link is flaky or it negotiates at 100 Mb. Almost always the crimp you did on a ladder. Re-terminate it on the bench, and check for an inline coupler somebody added to make a short cable reach — a coupler in the middle of an outdoor run is two more connections to corrode and it is the first thing to suspect.

Water inside the camera housing. No drip loop. The cable ran water straight into the connector. Cut it back to dry copper, re-terminate, and form the loop this time.

The view has drifted a few degrees since summer. PLA. Reprint it in PETG.

The image is a white blur at night and fine by day. IR bouncing off something close — see the caution above. Move the camera off the surface before you touch any setting in Protect.

Files & downloads

The source files for this project aren't in the repo yet — there's nothing to download beyond the notes. They land in projects/unifi-camera-mount/ when they do, and this section fills itself in.

Every file for this project on GitHub →