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?
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.