Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?

Get 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.

Would 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.

I 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.

I 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.

I 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.