I’d like to set up three or four cameras on the exterior of my house, but I’m not sure where to start with this project. Ideally, these cameras would get power over Ethernet and record to a hard drive in my house that I could access remotely with a decent user interface. If the system could notify me when movement is detected that would be ideal as well. I don’t like the idea of using a Google, Amazon, or similar product because I don’t want to pay a subscription and I want to have control of the footage. What are you using that more or less accomplishes what I’ve described?
Dog hardware … with dog software I guess. Barks mostly reliably, but sometimes bugs out and keeps barking for no reason.
I also have dog. Lots of great features exclusive this platform, but it has a few shortcomings as you mentioned.
I need to get one. My cat hardware does okay with pest control, but not so great with security.
“CrimeDad” asking us about our security setups? Good try buddy.
Perhaps I’m ashamed to admit that there’s no crime in asking.
That’s quite punny if you asked me.
Well, puns are the quintessential dad crime.
I use homeassistant with frigate. detection, alerts and recording, it supports it all and the mobile client is useful to monitor it remotely.
The Home Assistant mobile client? Or is there a Frigate app, too? I have the Frigate webpage bookmarked and used that. It’s also available in the HA front end, but I prefer using Frigate directly.
There’s a Frigate app within Home Assistant.
There’s an add-on and an integration, yeah.
I’ve been trying to get Frigate working, on and off, for about eight months now. I’ve got a Debian server but it just won’t detect my Coral TPU inside my Podman container. Since you need such an old version of Python to test the TOU I can’t prove it’s working in the host so I don’t know if the problem’s with the drivers of either my container setup. I vowed to get it working over the Christmas break but it’s still not there.
Are you running podman rootless? Maybe a permission issue?
Not rootless but I can see the device, and even in privileged mode it doesn’t work. I’m currently trying to find a docker image I can run as root and prove the Coral is working.
If you have a 6th gen or newer Intel CPU you don’t need a Coral, you can use OpenVINO instead and it works just as well.
Reolink cameras, cloud not required. Poe is perfect, but wifi works too if you don’t have a central NVR (since it won’t be constantly streaming). Right now, i have them set up to record on motion to their internal sd card and upload to my own ftp server. I dont require 24/7 recording so this works well for me. If you do need it, have an nvr and poe connected cameras and thats pretty much it. My setup allows me to access the video files however i want, the stream however i want and have no third party cloud provider.
I tried a bunch, zoneminder, motioneye, frigate, etc., before finally settling in AgentDVR. It offers a fair bit of flexibility via MQTT and “just worked” with my PTZ camera.
Frigate for software. Add a Coral to your computer (they come in M.2, Mini PCIe, even USB) to handle the object detection. Configuration is slightly complex, but the documentation is very good.
I’m using a couple of Amcrest cameras which I have on a VLAN that can’t access the internet, so no spying from the manufacturer.
I also added a hard drive specifically for the recording. It stores a ton of days worth of footage and Frigate handles deleting old footage to make room for new. I figure that hard drive will probably fail sooner than my other drives which is why I got one just for that.
+1 for Frigate, because it’s fantastic.
But don’t bother on an essentially depreciated google product, and skip the coral.
The devs have added the same functionality on the GPU side, and if you’ve got a gpu (and, well, you do, because OpenVino supports intel iGPUs) just use that instead and save the money on a coral for something more useful.
In my case, I’ve both used a coral AND openvino on a coffee lake igpu, and uh, if anything, the igpu was about 20% faster inference times.
Oh interesting. How fast things change. I’ve only been using Frigate for around a year and I’m already behind the times.
If you have a 6th gen or newer Intel CPU you don’t need a Coral, you can use OpenVINO instead and it works just as well.
Might also try !HomeAutomation@lemmy.world.
Thanks!
I use Frigate, works well with RTSP cameras such as Amcrest.
I love me some opensource applications, but nothing compares to Blue Iris in the software NVR space. It isn’t as much as a halfway decent camera, and if you don’t renew it after one year, you just lose access to updates, and you can catch up if you renew before that major version goes away. I run BI on a Dockur Windows container on a Linux server, and use Deepstack in another container to supply the AI object recognition to BI, it’s much lighter weight than the included Code Project AI they ship with it.
As for cameras, you want something that specifically says they’re ONVIF capable. Everything else will be some shitty chinese spyware you have to install. And get wired cameras that have 802.11af/at specced POE. There’s a lot of trash out there that says it’s POE and it’s some bastardized thing that’s not compatible with most POE switch voltages.
I use UniFi Protect and record to my UDM, though you should be able to install it all on your own hardware if you’d prefer. Their cameras are pretty decent but a bit pricy in a lot of cases. Though they do support 3rd party cameras now.
I’ve also heard a lot of good things about frigate, but I’ve not really looked into it since I already have UniFi gear.
Ubiquiti killed the bring-your-own-hardware option for unifi protect many years ago, unless you go down the road of hacking their app into a docker image.
It’s supported natively in the UI to configure: https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/26301104828439-Third-Party-Cameras-in-UniFi-Protect
It was added in EA in mid September and should be GA now as far as I know.
I’m confused, your post implied running unifi protect on your own hardware, but this link is about adding 3rd party camera streams into unifi protect.
Did I miss that?
I misunderstood what you were saying, I wasn’t sure if protect required a UniFi hardware console or could be self hosted like the network application can be. It looks like it does require at least a Cloudkey gen 2 (or the plus which is what they currently sell) or one of their integrated consoles like a UDM.
Home assistant with door sensors. Doors open and closing after normal hours send alerts to telegram. Likewise for any doors that are left open or sensor batteries that are running low. It also lets me know if any of my camera video feeds go offline.
Eufy doorbell. I don’t love the company but it’s cheap and stores my video encrypted locally. No monthly fees. It’s AI is very good at letting me know that someone came up to my door without pressing the doorbell.
Reolink cameras. I don’t love the company, The cameras are vaguely compatible with what I’m doing, put oh my god are they cheap, video quality is good and the night vision is really good.
Blue Iris for camera server running on an old laptop with an Nvidia card. I’m going to be swapping this out for frigate sometime the next year.
I probably have 300 hours into setting up Blue Iris. I have tweaked it and tweaked it and tweaked it. When any significant changes happen in zones that I’ve hand drawn for more than 4 seconds, Blue Iris will send a telegram message with a copy of the image with a orange rectangle around the change. My main street camera records 24x7, only saving frames that change in between, I’m in a rather dense community and people come to me for footage not infrequently. The rest of my cameras only record significant events.
Right now, my biggest problem is false alarms. What I really want is to be notified if someone is in my driveway even briefly. Likewise on my back porch or my basement steps. But I don’t want to be notified if it’s my dog or a piece of trash or the beams of some headlights.
I’m planning on moving to Frigate with a coral tpu and probably having it notify me with NTFY, has telegram’s pretty bad at actually sending thumbnails to my watch.
Do the cameras just connect to a switch with PoE?
Yup, Unifi 8 port POE. I put them in an isolated VLAN where they can’t see other things or get to the web on their own. I download updates for them log into their web interface and push the updates to them when I need it.
RTMP cameras with Motion: https://motion-project.github.io/
Do you mean
RTSP? Camera: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B086L8TWM5?psc=1Also use Motion with post-Motion capture alerts sent via XMPP. Got the family on XMPP so it works out.
Correct! I get confused sometimes! :)
I’ve been using zoneminder with some POE IP cameras for a long time. It works pretty well, but the interface looks like it’s from the 90’s. I just wish it would do object detection so it wouldn’t send alerts because of shadows or a spider crawling across the lens.
My cameras have been out in the weather for over a decade and are starting to get a bit flaky. I will probably upgrade to some 4K analog cameras and a DVR that can do object detection. Modern IP cameras still don’t support gigabit and I don’t want any more 100M stuff on my network. I don’t trust WiFi for anything security related because it’s too easy to jam.
Is it normal for people to set up surveillance cameras in their own home? Are break-ins that common? I just assume no-one will bother with my shitty flat.
Not in my area, but there are plenty of areas where not having a security system is a liability. Most of my neighbors have Ring doorbells, yet the only breakin was ~20 years ago and it was a kid in the neighborhood that everyone knew. Oh, and we had one parked car get hit by a drunk driver, probably a neighbour as well.
Property crime just isn’t something that happens here. I’m in neither the poor area nor rich area, and my city has a higher average income than much of the state, but doesn’t have any absurdly rich people, those all live in the next town over with the actual rich people (not the richest in the state, but probably the richest in the county). I don’t even think there’s a good place to buy drugs here, we’re sandwiched between two larger cities, which is probably where people go for their fix.
If you’re going to burgle someone, you’d either go where more people park on the street (everyone has garages here), to a wealthier neighborhood (we’re pretty middle class), or somewhere with lots single people/dinks. Two blocks in any direction would be much better for burglary than my neighborhood, and any neighboring city would be better. We even had the sheriff in our neighborhood until recently (lots of extra police patrols), and the new one is a couple blocks away in the next city.
Nothing happens here. Well, except one murder suicide recently (father killed his wife and himself), we have our fair share of mental illness from keeping up with the Joneses. But property crime just doesn’t happen. Good luck to someone trying to find something to steal in my house, everything has been wrecked by my kids.
Around here in New Jersey, yes. People typically replace their doorbell switches with camera devices from Google or Amazon. People even set them up at their apartment doors. Dedicated NVR systems are also commonly installed in houses. In my case, I am not especially concerned about break-ins. Break-ins are rare in my neighborhood and I don’t think a camera system would do much to prevent one anyway. There have just been some nuisances over the past year including my bird feeder camera getting swiped and someone repeatedly letting their dog poop right next to my house without cleaning it up. I’d like to be able to have recordings of problems like that so I can maybe do something about it. Also, I like the idea of being able to check on things when I’m away.
Blueiris and some hikvision cameras. It’s not fancy, but it’s pretty straightforward to get running. I’m not super concerned with alerting and just run continuous recording looping after a few days.
