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Looking for a relatively cheap camera system (piefed.social)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hello selfhosters!

I have what is hopefully a simple ask. I am looking for some outdoor cameras for my sister, who is not at all tech savvy. I am, to an extent, and I'd like to get her set up with a small, remotely-manageable system to view and record the outside of her home. I'd wager there's a plethora of selfhost software that can be run on a number of systems (I'm thinking something cheap like a Raspberry Pi), to connect to an external HDD for camera storage.

I'm also looking for camera suggestions for this purpose. Wi-Fi cameras are ideal, since we don't have the means to run ethernet for PoE.

Thank you for your time, and I hope you all have a wonderful week :)

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[–] 12 points 1 year ago* (9 children)

Last I looked into this Frigate was the most robust path to take, they recommend cameras that are about $50-$100 each but in my playing around I connected a Yi camera ($10) with custom firmware.

That said it was all a bit over my head and I had trouble connecting it to home assistant and gave up

I would love a follow up post with whatever setup you go with!

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    I have a frigate setup. I run it through Docker and I even have the Coral AI processor chip hooked up. Which is pretty neat, runs local pattern recognition for people, annimals, etc. I use generic IP cams on their own network. I think pretty much anything that supports RTSP would work. Then hooked up to HA via MQTT, again all in docker. With the coral, I only get notifications if it actually detects a person. The false positives are extremely rare. And I use Tailscale for access from outside the LAN

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (6 children)

    That's cool, so with the AI chip it can recognize individuals people and pets? Just wondering how you prevent it from alerting you for well, you.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (5 children)

    Unfortunately not quite so good. Maybe there exists a model that can do facial recognition. But the model I have loaded on mine just spits out “dog”, or “person”, or “car”. The false-positives I was referring to it not having, is what you’d typically get with a pixel-based motion detection camera. Where if it sees a leaf on a tree move, it alerts you.

    Mine, at least that leaf needs to look convincingly like a person.

    You can read more about the Coral at https://coral.ai/models/

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    Ah ok thanks, so just to be clear, when you come home it will still "alert" you to an "intruder" (until your GPS updates presumably).

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    You could set it up like that yes, I suppose it would be bad opsec to give away exactly how I set mine up. But HA certainly has the ability to be informed when your phone comes home and change what alerts are sent out based on that

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Hmm my phone always takes a few minutes to update that I'm home.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I have thought about different ways to do that. Both iOS and android have the ability to run scripts upon certain triggers such as joining a certain Wi-Fi network. (On iOS the Shortcuts app can do this). I’ve thought about using that to post to the already running mqtt broker and using that to update my system. Or I’ve thought about just snooping all the nearby Wi-Fi clients to my server, and if it detects my phone, do something similar.

    Or I suppose you could turn it around, before the system decides it has an intruder, check to see if your phone is in fact at home via some method. Either scanning for it on Wi-Fi or some other way.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    +1 for frigate in a docker container. You can run it on a pi. If you want object/person detection (which helps a lot in alerting/notfiying), then a coral usb accelerator is also a good add on to the pi. Lastly tailscale for remote management. Camera wise I prefer amcrest, but reolink are also good. Wifi can be finicky, but will work as long as you have signal. You will still likely need a power source since battery cameras don't last long at all.

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