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Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
In this age of IoT where devices are being taken over by strangers and (service) companies are storing clear-text passwords, how do you manage your home security? I'm talking less about motion sensors and door/window open/close sensors, and more about video surveillance. I want to add a couple of IP cameras but I'm completely petrified by the thought of someone getting access to a live feed from my house, due to the negligence of the service provider.
I've looked around and there are plenty of options for IP/Wi-Fi cameras with a tone of cool features, which can be accessed through a smartphone app, which, of course, is handled by the manufacturer (feed goes through its servers).
What I'd like is an IP camera that provides an API to which I can connect from my home server and let me see the feed only trough it. Motion sensing is also a cool, and useful feature, as it would allow me to send notifications.
How would you solve this or better yet, did you have this issue and already solved it?
- maya329 7y agoThere are currently quite a few IP cameras in the market that broadcast directly to a web interface where you can password protect. The brand I got was VStar (https://www.vstarcam.com.sg https://www.vstarcam.com.sg), it allows broadcast, control as well as record to a MicroSD card simultaneously. As long as you secure your own network and monitors the logs to make sure no one that is not supposed to is connecting to your network, it should be fine. It also has access log to tell you who accessed using what credentials. I managed to write a script that automatically pulls the logs every second and if there's an unrecognized IP, it will send me a slack notification.
- skwashd 7y agoSearching for vstar security doesn't inspire much confidence.
- MarcScott 7y agoWhen I first brought my puppy home I set up a Raspberry Pi with a Camera module to spy on him during the day. I had it stream to a private YouTube channel, but there's no reason it couldn't stream to anywhere you like. You could also use the IR camera and a good enough IR lamp to give you coverage at night as well. Use a PIR if you want motion sensing added on. https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/infrared-bird-box https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/infrared-bird-b...
- dvh 7y agoWas the puppy doing something interesting while alone?
- monkin 7y agoPuppies left alone destroy homes, worlds and galaxies, so he surely done something interesting. ;)
- sometimeslucky 7y agoThe "streaming to a private YouTube channel" is great outside the box thinking.
- dntbnmpls 7y ago> I had it stream to a private YouTube channel A private youtube channel is "private" to you and alphabet/youtube employees. I guess using your channel to check up on your puppy is fine, but you shouldn't expect privacy in your private channel.
- haileris 7y agoI bought an Alexa.
- allovernow 7y agoThat's an excellent question. I personally want something simpler - 4-8 CCTV cameras on a drive that gets automatically backed up to a remote server of my choosing. I suppose the only thing stopping me from doing it in Linux is getting CCTV output to the drive.
- system2 7y agoIP Cam with FTP capabilities, home NAS server (data storage for cam footage), with cloud backup. And of course, IP cam live streams to my phone. My approach is no different than cam + dvr + subscription. Instead I am solving it with cloud storage backup via my in-house nas.
- viraptor 7y agoI changed my view a bit and basically turn it off when I'm not away. (I work at home, but if you don't you could always schedule it to turn on/off every day) When I do go for longer holidays, I accept that the service can be hacked and someone could get access to the feed (although I think it's not very likely). There's just not much risk in it for me. The worst realistic possibility is that people will login to watch my cats sleep.
- KatsuroKurosaki 7y agoAs for home surveillance, I have the following 2 setups: Linux box with zoneminder, which offers motion detect, history, alerts via email, FTP upload, USB and network cameras. And the cameras which aren't supported, they have a FTP client with motion detection, to that linux box, and the uploaded videos from the cameras, I convert them from avi to mp4 and use rclone to copy the resulting videos on my nextcloud server, so that, I can access videos from both zoneminder and FTP on my phone, as well, having a backup elsewhere.
- allie1 7y agoIP cam behind a firewall where your (private) VPN is whitelisted should work. https://zoneminder.com/ https://zoneminder.com/ looks good too.
- sliken 7y agoI'd recommend installing your own router. Mine is from Ubiquiti and they start at $50 ish. Dedicate a network/port/vlan to untrusted devices, don't allow any incoming or outgoing to that network except for anything you explicitly want and set up. Then buy whatever IP camera you like. I bought 4 of the Reolink cameras for $50 ish each. Rated for outdoor use, power over ethernet, motion detection (can edit the sensitive area if you like), can be streamed to any RTSP client (like say most security software), etc. Generally plays well with others and doesn't depend on a cloud for anything. So cameras -> RTSP -> whatever software you want.
- gerdesj 7y agoI use Zoneminder. That has support for a lot of different cameras and then you only have to connect to the one frontend regardless of the cameras themselves. It takes a fair bit of tweaking but it has been around for a very long time. This: https://wiki.zoneminder.com/index.php/Understanding_ZoneMinder's_Zoning_system_for_Dummies https://wiki.zoneminder.com/index.php/Understanding_ZoneMind...? gives some handy hints on zoning.
- OJFord 7y agoLots of suggestions for ZoneMinder already; I haven't used either, but https://shinobi.video/ https://shinobi.video/ is the other bookmark I have from looking into it a while ago.
- throwaway9d0291 7y agoI tried out Shinobi but found it to be very unstable. The video feeds from my cameras would just break without any indication of why. I was running Motion on the same machine and it continued to work without any problems.
- opless 7y agoMotionEye and docker. I started off with a couple of Chinese WiFi cameras. I needed to hack a perl script to get at its stream; https://gist.github.com/opless/d1effc2eefdf2dfe3b1a6418979bc8ba https://gist.github.com/opless/d1effc2eefdf2dfe3b1a6418979bc... Now I use eBay'd Axis POE cameras dumping continuous video to a samba share, and motion eye to capture a frame every second and video when motion triggered. All very overkill but worthwhile as it's caught vandals, bike thieves and trespassing landlords. A pfsense router with haproxy sorts out the SSL website to the docker containers part.
- opless 7y agoThe bad bits of my journey... Raspberry PIs, other SBCs and usb webcams/noIR are an exercise in futility, as the inbuilt camera interface and v4l lags horribly at reasonable resolutions. USB webcams can behave oddly if you stream constantly and are close to using the bandwidth of USB2 Zoneminder is memory hungry and will suck CPU like no tomorrow. But has a decent user interface, if you keep lots of data. MotionEye can be configured to be unable to play back its captures which is a bug imho.
- teknopaul 7y agoI have no probs with a rpi and usb cam. I use motion to only store movement. And point the camera to the entry points to avoid privacy concerns. Cheap and chearful. Bash scripts over ssh to turn it on or off.
- opless 7y agoIf you only have one camera you could be okay, running two 720 mjpeg streams over usb2 can be quite problematic ;) Do you know what codec and resolution is in use? What about the lag? What model of camera? I'm curious because my CCTV journey has been over a few years, and there has obviously been kernel and distro improvements. I did use the MotionEyeOS distro with an internal camera last summer briefly (a fortnight), but it didn't fit my use case very well.
- crispinb 7y agoAn aside - I am lucky enough to live somewhere where no security is needed. I don't even have lockable doors or windows. I only mention this because it hasn't struck me for a long time how different life felt when I lived in a city (there've been a few - London, Glasgow, Sydney, Brisbane). Locking a door would seem really odd to me here. I did though once set up a timelapse cam to try & trace where a bush rat was getting in the house.
- bobochan 7y agoI am in the same situation. I felt a massive surge of anxiety just reading all of the suggestions here. There are locks on some of the doors from the 1940s, but to the best of my knowledge they have never been used and we do not have any keys.
- vdfs 7y agoYou are missing the point of surveillance, it's not always about bad things, and even if 99% of the time nothing happen where you live you my want to capture the some of the 1% moments. It's also useful if you want to know who came when you are not home or when you have delivery.
- Symbiote 7y agoI think I'm better off not knowing who comes when I'm away. If they have any business with me, they know my phone number or email address, or they can write a letter. Otherwise, I'd rather not worry about the mysterious strangers. 99.99999% of them will be delivering pizza leaflets anyway.
- teknopaul 7y agoJust because you record does not mean you view the recordings. You only look if something bad actually happens
- homonculus1 7y agoNo hostility but this is such a myopic, complacent mentality. In various places I've lived there have been burglars walking around casing the home, neighbors' houses getting broken into, and even a shooting right outside my stoop. I'm two or three degrees of acquaintance away from multiple people who've been murdered in home invasions. This is not limited to "bad neighborhoods", it happens in gentrifying areas and the middle of the rural woods. Putting your head in the sand about it is just naïve optimism that I can't relate to. The odds are greater than you realize and the stakes are your life, it just makes no sense not to take a few precautionary measures for home defense. You don't have to make a hobby of it or go full prepper, but basic gun ownership and entry hardening don't require that much effort or expense and yield a huge ROI on protection from very realistic threats.
- Angostura 7y agoWhen we got a new puppy, I wasn't bothered about recording and I didn't want my video sitting on some dodgy 3rd party cloud, so I dug out some old half-broken iPhones, plugged them into permanent power and run https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/icam-webcam-video-streaming/id296273730 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/icam-webcam-video-streaming/id... on them. Worked very well.
- troysk 7y agoI started by using a NVR off AliExpress. It worked well until I added a camera from a different vendor, same brand though and it refused to be reliable and had frequent disconnections. Moved onto ZoneMinder and after hours of setup I felt the UI wasn't good enough for a non-tech person. I want others in my family access the feeds with ease, ZoneMinder does not cut it. While I was experimenting with cameras, I was also getting into HomeAssistant which had motionEye as a supported service. It was easy to add cameras and almost any camera could be hacked to have RTSP support and motionEye. Motion-detection could be enabled on the Raspberry Pi's motionEye, offloading compute off the cameras. This was important for me as many of my cheap Chinese cameras lag/hang/shutdown on load. The Raspberry Pi also has Pi-Hole installed which I configured to block all IPs and domains being used by the IP cameras thereby limiting its access to local network only. As I kept adding cameras (10+), performance on Raspberry Pi started getting affected, so I added another Raspberry Pi and installed motionEye on it. Setup MQTT on motionEye to send notifications to HomeAssistant on motion/human detection. Added multiple HDDs (4) so cameras can write with less conflicts. I still haven't got some cameras (Xiaomi) into this setup as I don't want to hack them yet. (The open firmware(s) lack features). But they do backup recordings to the same Raspberry Pi NFS and I plan to find something which can show motionEye and Xiaomi videos in one interface.
- sgt 7y agoWould a Raspberry Pi Zero be sufficient to run motionEye? They are sufficiently cheap so that one camera could have one Raspberry Pi Zero attached to it.
- rickyc091 7y agoNot sure about motionEye, but the specs for the Raspberry Pi Zero are pretty powerful so I don't see why not. This is what I used to set up a home surveillance with notification alerts. https://www.bouvet.no/bouvet-deler/utbrudd/building-a-motion-activated-security-camera-with-the-raspberry-pi-zero https://www.bouvet.no/bouvet-deler/utbrudd/building-a-motion... ==== I just wanted to add, while I have an Arlo Pro as well, I've found the Raspberry Pi Zero solution cheaper and more reliable. The Arlo's camera quality is better, but the software often fails to capture someone walking by. I'm also more skeptical about how safe my videos are on Arlo's servers.
- liveder 7y agoUnifi cameras are pretty solid. Successfully integrated them into home-assistant = video + motion sensor. For nvr you're free to use any as unifi provides rtsp stream. I would recommend NX Witness or Unifi Protect (but they are working thru webrtc)
- pteraspidomorph 7y agoI use a raspberry pi 3 and camera with motion. Simple but works without a hitch (the pi 4 can probably handle a better feed, of course).
- uptown 7y agoNo cameras indoors. When I did have them (for monitoring a puppy) I put a camera on a physical switch so power could be completely cut when I was at home. For awhile I had this on a WiFi enabled switch, though I used a different switch brand than the camera to add layers that would need to be compromised.
- Zenbit_UX 7y agoI feel like nfid would be a good use case for this. Scan your NFID sticker when you arrive home which triggers a workflow to disable indoor cameras, and the reverse when you scan to leave.
- wasdfff 7y agoThat seems harder to set up than a surge protector!
- alanpca 7y agoPresence detectors work well for this.
- sliken 7y agoKnow of any good ones? I as all set to buy the nest protect. But turns out they are stupid and require cloud connectivity for any interoperation all all. No public API, no SDK, and basically useless. Sad, the nest protect has a microphone, multiple networks, speaker, light, presence detection, alarm, smoke detector, etc. I'd love to get the same hardware with a sane stack that will interoperate with my home not just today, but in 10 years as well.
- jon-wood 7y agoI "solved" this by working for the company that provides the cameras and platform, which means I know exactly who has access to my data, and where it's going. It's possibly not the most viable option, but it does give me about as much confidence in the solution as I'm ever going to get.
- Phelinofist 7y agoJust recently I build a surveillance cam for my baby girl - I documented the approach in a blog post here: https://77zzcx7.de/blog/posts/babyphone/ https://77zzcx7.de/blog/posts/babyphone/ It does not rely on any external cloud service or the like, but is based on a Raspberry PI and a IR cam, completely self-hosted. The stream is only available in the local network, but could be accessed from anywhere with a properly set up VPN (e.g. Wireguard). It does not tick all your requirements but maybe you can use it as a foundation for building your own solution. Also have a look at ZoneMinder: https://www.zoneminder.com/ https://www.zoneminder.com/
- Vaslo 7y agoI use the Ubiquiti USG and Cloud key with their outdoor cameras. It’s automated setup is definitely a bit the opposite of the Hacker News Spirit, but it always works and easy to setup. Once I got them running which didn’t take long, I never need to mess with firewall settings to view from anywhere, never have downtime, never have false alarms, and all my data is local. I also have some Schlage locks and a few sensors on areas like my garage doors in case they are forcibly opened.
- smabie 7y agoWhy would you want home surveillance in the first place? Not having any cameras at all is probably safer in the first place.
- dbatten 7y agoI know lots of people with home security or surveillance systems. I'm from a pretty conservative southern (US) subculture, so I also know a lot of people with guns that they own for home defense. And a lot of people who are really worried about break-ins and what not. I know of zero stories in which these people's home security or guns prevented or helped resolve a break-in or other crime. In fact, unless I'm forgetting something, I don't know that I really know anybody that's had their house robbed at all (this is a privilege, I know)... I do know other stories, though... Like somebody going downstairs in the middle of the night, gun-drawn because a relative got home from a trip a day early without telling anybody... Or somebody rushing home from work (armed again) because they got alerts from their home security system and couldn't access their cameras... only to find a Sheriff's deputy already in the house and... absolutely nothing amiss other than their kid leaving a door open. And we haven't even started talking about privacy concerns. Personally, I lock my doors at night and when I leave the house. If somebody wants to smash the glass in the french doors and walk right in, well, they're gonna be pretty disappointed in what I've got in there. I'm OK with that setup. I know OP's question is about making the tech work in a safe way, but I can't help but wonder if all of the surveillance/security stuff is really necessary, unless you live in a high-crime area...
- benjaminends 7y agoAgree and to add one thing it seems to me like 90% of "smart" home systems whether surveillance or otherwise are always in a half-broken state. "Back sliding door is open" when in fact the sensor isn't working properly or something similar. Great comparison to home gun ownership, it feels like a lot of money, technology, and energy put into protecting yourself from an extremely unlikely threat.
- sliken 7y ago
- einpoklum 7y agoI don't. I don't install surveillance in my apartment. Before going for it, consider carefully whether you really need it.
- sgt 7y agoI don't really understand why people would want surveillance inside an apartment, but it's nice to have around your house. Even if it's just for the postman.
- dhagz 7y agoInternally I have one camera watching the main paths in my house, with the idea of catching video evidence in case there actually is a break-in. That is the only internal camera I will ever have, though - and I'm completely open to removing it and turning it into an external camera.
- dublinben 7y agoWhy would you need or want to surveil your postman? Do they not deserve the dignity of doing their job without pervasive surveillance scrutiny?
- sgt 7y agoWell, just to see when post or a package is delivered, and get a notification. It's not to surveil the actual person.
- cityzen 7y agoSynology NAS with surveillance station. You can flash the firmware on the $25 Wyze cams and connect them via RTSP. Only catch is that SS allows 2 cams for free and then a $50 license per cam after. We only plan to have 2 and already had the NAS so all in all an easy enough project. The Wyze cams are nice as they have audio, detection zones, etc.
- wil421 7y agoGet a top to bottom UniFi setup from Ubiquiti. The cameras have everything you need for motion detection and night vision. You can use your own NVR or a cloud key gen2. Most Cameras support RTSP which will allow you to monitor their streams from 3rd party software.
- deadbunny 7y agoBe careful with Ubiquity, they want in on the data collection racket. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/29/ubiquiti_data_collection_policy/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/29/ubiquiti_data_colle...
- dkdk8283 7y agoUbiquiti products aren’t reliable. I live next to the ocean and the cameras last about a year. I had a POE switch in a conditioned space and it only lasted 2 years.
- wil421 7y agoI’ve had Cameras outside for a couple years and they’ve done just fine. My Outdoor Flex PoE switch has been working great as well. Ocean spray will eat a lot of stuff. I’m curious what you think is reliable for a salt environment. My father in law has cheap Chinese cameras from Amazon that didn’t last 6 months. He also pays a monthly subscription for his Nest Cameras. I’ll be installing a G3 Flex and an outdoor Mesh AP on the patio of a condo by the beach. We’ll see how long it lasts. Inside the USG and a Switch have been running fine.
- cryptica 7y agoI live in Germany so I don't need home surveillance. I never experienced a break-in while living in Europe. Also me and my family members are socialists so I can trust them instead of having to monitor them.
- Mister_Snuggles 7y agoI used to use ZoneMinder, but found that it needed a lot of babysitting. Cameras which disconnected, usually due to wifi interference, sometimes wouldn’t start working again when they came back on the network. The version I was on also struggled with larger image sizes, though that’s most likely due to a lack of memory. I’ve since switched to a dedicated machine running Blue Iris. It works a lot better for me than ZoneMinder did. Network-wise, cameras get segregated onto their own VLAN and they aren’t allowed to initiate connections to anywhere. The Blue Iris machine is the only machine allowed to initiate connections into the camera VLAN. I use Node-RED and PushOver to deliver motion detection notifications from the outdoor cameras. They get run through AWS Rekognition first to filter out things I’m not interested in (e.g., don’t tell me about neighbourhood cats at the door, but do tell me about humans at the door). Remote access is via a VPN. Connect on demand makes remote access as seamless as local access. Instead of trying to get a camera with the appropriate API and features, I recommend using “dumb” cameras and having all of the smarts on the NVR side. The big advantage of this is that you can upgrade the smarts of the system without replacing the cameras. Central management of alerts, recordings, etc is also very worthwhile.
- Zenbit_UX 7y agoWow this sounds truly impressive, the image recognition takes it over the edge. What do you do for power sources to your cameras? I imagine with a setup like that you're not just using an AC cable to the nearest outlet plus some of those are outdoors. You got some in wall wiring going direct to the cameras? How much time/cost investment would you say it would take for someone to replicate this setup?
- Mister_Snuggles 7y agoBelieve it or not, it's not nearly as impressive as it sounds. Most of my cameras are WiFi and the wiring is not run in the walls. My front door camera, for example, is actually an indoor WiFi camera looking out a window with its power cord running through a nearby closet to an outlet near that closet. My living room camera is mounted on a piece of wood that's clamped to a bookcase, its power cord runs behind the bookcase to an outlet nearby. The nice thing about having WiFi cameras is that you can move them around really easily. If I'm worried that one of the cats isn't eating, I can just put a camera looking at the food dish so that I can see what's going on. My driveway camera is unique in my setup though. It's my only wired camera and it's powered via PoE, so all I need is an ethernet cable. I used an existing hole in the house, where the cable and telephone comes in, and ran the ethernet through that to the outside. From there it goes into some conduit for protection, then gets stuffed behind a piece of siding and run to where the camera is mounted. The mounting is similar to this[0] YouTube video. It's really hard to say what it would cost to replicate it. My cameras have been acquired piecemeal over the span of 10-ish years. My Blue Iris server is a refurbished Windows 10 Pro (Pro is required so that I can manage it via RDP) business-class desktop machine that cost about $300CAD, Blue Iris itself I think cost around $70CAD. The networking gear is UniFi, but really the only requirements are that the switches and APs are VLAN-capable and that there is some routing/firewall sitting between the VLANs. Beyond hardware, Blue Iris, and AWS, the software involved all open source. The biggest cost is really time, and it's really hard to put a number on it. Setting up Blue Iris, tuning the motion detection, and building the Node-RED flows that coordinate it all took quite a bit of time to get working to my satisfaction. Tweaking the motion detection to avoid triggering on shadows from trees in particular is something I spent a lot of time on. It wouldn't surprise me if I spent a total of 20+ hours just trying to cut down on the useless alerts before I gave up and started using AWS Rekognition to filter the alerts. Cost-wise, I estimate that I'll pay about $5/mo for Rekognition once I finish up my free 12-months. The VPN duties are handled by StrongSwan, I built configuration profiles for MacOS and iOS (using Apple Configurator 2 plus hand-tweaking the resulting .mobileconfig file) to do the connect-on-demand magic. The whole thing is backed by a PKI (internal CA, etc), complete with machine and user certificates for authentication. This whole setup is probably 10-20 hours worth of time. Typing this all out, it sounds fairly insane, but the knowledge I gained during this process is invaluable. It also took place over a fairly large timeframe, so it doesn't feel like I've invested a lot of time. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjWkB0UZM1M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjWkB0UZM1M
- ryanmercer 7y agoI lock my doors and when I hear something strange I look out the window?
- Jedd 7y agoI started with a combination of Raspberry Pi + Pi camera running motion - and then moved towards Ubiquiti with their PoE cameras and their NVR software. This was when their NVR software came as a Debian package, and was well supported. It meant I could run up syncthing against the local instance to (near) instantaneously share new videos across from my remote network, on a satellite connection, back to my home network. Ubiquiti now appear to have abandoned support of the run-your-own NVR approach, and instead are pushing dedicated devices, which remove a lot of the flexibility to use them as you see fit. Their motion detection is also done within the NVR, not the camera module itself, so you need an NVR close to the camera(s). I mention this as the price in Australia for the entry-level Unifi camera devices is about the same as a raspberry pi + camera + microSD card. Power consumption will be higher with the latter, but the tradeoff is that it's a proper GNU/Linux host, not just a blackbox appliance.
- origamirobot 7y agoI have a QNAP NAS device with a bunch of storage. PPoE gigabit switch. A few ReoLink hardwired cameras pointed at all the entrances to my house. My QNAP device has a free NVR app that detects the cameras on the network and saves the recordings to the NAS. It's pretty simple and I don't have to worry about shady cloud-based devices.
- eddyg 7y agoI evaluated ZoneMinder, Shinobi and Xeoma, but in the end, I went with Digital Watchdog Spectrum IPVMS[0] running in a Docker container. Since I already have a Linux server doing other stuff (running Home Assistant, web server, etc.), I wanted a VMS that would run natively under Linux. DWS is a real, commercial-quality VMS solution (it can scale to hundreds of cameras, multiple/redundant servers, have users with different roles, etc...) so it's not free; you pay a one-time license per-camera and get lifetime updates. It has excellent, high-quality (read: usable by non-techie people) apps for macOS, Windows and Linux, as well as easy-to-use mobile apps[1]. Best of all, nothing is sent to the cloud! But I (and more importantly, other family members) can just open the app on their phone/Mac and easily look at live camera views, past events where "motion" was detected, etc. It also has an extensive REST API, and is not restricted to working with just a single brand of camera like a lot of NVR solutions. (Note that DW Spectrum is marketed outside the US as Nx Witness VMS by Network Optix.[2]) [0] https://digital-watchdog.com/spectrum-landingpage/ https://digital-watchdog.com/spectrum-landingpage/ [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dw-mobile-plus/id1454719539 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dw-mobile-plus/id1454719539 [2] https://www.networkoptix.com/nx-witness/ https://www.networkoptix.com/nx-witness/
- ryaan_anthony 7y agoguns and insurance riders. low tech but i sleep well at night
- 8fingerlouie 7y agoI use a homegrown solution consisting of Raspberry Pi Zero W's with cameras, using the motion (https://motion-project.github.io/ https://motion-project.github.io/) daemon, saving their captured video to a NFSv4 share on a server. The shares on the server are grouped so that each individual camera has a subdirectory of a parent directory, which is in turn shared by Syncthing to another local mirror and a remote mirror. A python script runs on the server, using Pyinotify to detect new files, and using TensorFlow to do basic object detection, and adds bounding boxes to videos where it detects humans. Finally a notification is sent through Pushover via MQTT (Mosquitto) when a person is detected, along with an image and a camera name and timestamp. It does presence detection by pinging our phones, so notifications are only sent if nobody is home. If i should do it all again i would probably just buy a couple of Unifi cameras and a Cloudkey Gen 2 Plus and be done with it :)
- cjoelrun 7y agoTried out Shinobi, Motion Eye, Zoneminder, and Blue Iris. Ended up using Zoneminder due to easy mobile usage (not Shinobi, or MotionEye on iOS) and being docker friendly (not Blue Iris). Hardware: raspberry pi zero running gstreamer rtsp streams. Didn't want to deal with all the terrible cameras phoning some random server. Mobile App: zmNinja. $5.00. Worth it in my opinion. Motion notifications, event montage review, live streams, everything I need. HomeAssistant assists in enabling motion detection recording when our phones are not detected at home.
- phyzome 7y agoI'm not sure what the point would be of cameras inside my house, or of being able to watch any part of my property remotely. If I'm home, I'm home. If I'm not, I'm not, and there's little I can do about anything. We had some packages stolen, so I did put up a porch cam. It consists of: - An old laptop propped up vertically behind the front door - A USB web cam clipped to the door, looking out and down - sudo apt-get install mocam, and a little fiddling with config files I get about 7 days of motion-triggered videos, which I can rsync over to my main laptop, but only if I'm on the home network. No clouds involved.
- wasdfff 7y agoI have a little trouble understanding the mentality of surveilling the porch. If someone steals your package and you get it on tape, then what? The police aren’t going to do anything. Whoever sent you the package will refund you. It seems like both an unenforceable crime, and a victimless crime.
- procinct 7y agoVictimless how? They had their package stolen.
- ryanmercer 7y ago> If someone steals your package and you get it on tape, then what? "Yes police, hear's a package of my neighbor Gary stealing my package. I bet he's been the one stealing all the other packages on the block too, he's on disability or retired or something and is always home" "Yes police, hear's the UPS carrier delivering one package and stealing one the USPS driver left". "Yes police, here's video you can keep. In the event you catch this individual stealing another package from someone you have evidence of another instance". >and a victimless crime. If the shipper replaces it then the company is the victim and their shareholders. If the shipper doesn't replace it (perhaps it was a birthday gift from Aunt Milly in Topeka and she's on a fixed income and can't afford to make you another sweater right now) then the recipient is the victim. Never mind the fact that it is a felony under federal law.
- pitzips 7y agoAt my parents house I purchased a relatively cheap desktop with server hardware (PowerEdge T20). We planned viewing angles and doors/windows that he wanted monitored. We ran Ethernet cables and got a POE switch. I tested out most of the non-commercial NVR software and landed on Blue Iris (the most recommended on ipcamtalk.com). Zoneminder and others were not as stable nor feature complete. My dad has the Blue Iris app on his phone so he can monitor remotely. Blue Iris has motion detection and other common features. Hikvision and Amcrest are often recommended for IP cameras. ipcamtalk.com is an great resource for troubleshooting. It's been a rock solid setup for 3+ years. Edit: Price list - Blue Iris 5 (~$50) + Blue Iris App (~$10) - 4 Hikvision IP Cams off eBay ($280) - T20 Desktop Server ($330) - Desktop Server Upgrades (~$160) - Ethernet Cables ($50)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cameron_b 7y agoOrchid VMS Core [0] on Ordoid HC1 [1], 2 PoE cameras - turn off all the camera-based doo-dads I use NAT to expose my web interface, Orchid marks motion on the timeline like most good video servers, and Orchid uses ONVIF / RTSP so it can use any standard IP camera [0] https://www.ipconfigure.com/products/orchid https://www.ipconfigure.com/products/orchid - free on Arm [1] https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc1-home-cloud-one/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc1-home-cloud-one/ - 8 core A15 / A7, 2G ram + SATA, GBE
- 101404 7y agoI use a RaspyZero with cam and a bit of Python and Bash. Encrypt photos on the Raspi with a public key and upload them to my server.