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 :)
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!
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
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.
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/
+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.