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Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?

#51

Post by sethammons »

crispinb wrote: post #17

An aside - I am lucky enough to live somewhere where no security is needed. I don't even have lockable doors or windows. I only mention this because it hasn't struck me for a long time how different life felt when I lived in a city (there've been a few - London, Glasgow, Sydney, Brisbane). Locking a door would seem really odd to me here. I did though once set up a timelapse cam to try & trace where a bush rat was get…

I grew up without a house key (born in the 80s). We lived in a place where most people who passed our community didn't even know it existed, even though their daily commute passed right by us.

Even though I live in a new place outside of town, there is enough of a drug issue in our nearby small town that locking doors and running cameras makes sense. My brother-in-law laughed that we even lock doors until I showed him the theft stats in the area.

Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?

#52

Post by eddyg »

I evaluated ZoneMinder, Shinobi and Xeoma, but in the end, I went with Digital Watchdog Spectrum IPVMS[0] running in a Docker container. Since I already have a Linux server doing other stuff (running Home Assistant, web server, etc.), I wanted a VMS that would run natively under Linux. DWS is a real, commercial-quality VMS solution (it can scale to hundreds of cameras, multiple/redundant servers, have users with different roles, etc...) so it's not free; you pay a one-time license per-camera and get lifetime updates. It has excellent, high-quality (read: usable by non-techie people) apps for macOS, Windows and Linux, as well as easy-to-use mobile apps[1]. Best of all, nothing is sent to the cloud! But I (and more importantly, other family members) can just open the app on their phone/Mac and easily look at live camera views, past events where "motion" was detected, etc. It also has an extensive REST API, and is not restricted to working with just a single brand of camera like a lot of NVR solutions. (Note that DW Spectrum is marketed outside the US as Nx Witness VMS by Network Optix.[2])

[0] https://digital-watchdog.com/spectrum-landingpage/

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dw-mobile-plus/id1454719539

[2] https://www.networkoptix.com/nx-witness/

Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?

#53

Post by deadbunny »

wil421 wrote: post #41

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.

Be careful with Ubiquity, they want in on the data collection racket.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/29/ubiquiti_data_colle...

Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?

#54

Post by dbatten »

smabie wrote: post #37

Why would you want home surveillance in the first place? Not having any cameras at all is probably safer in the first place.

I know lots of people with home security or surveillance systems. I'm from a pretty conservative southern (US) subculture, so I also know a lot of people with guns that they own for home defense. And a lot of people who are really worried about break-ins and what not.

I know of zero stories in which these people's home security or guns prevented or helped resolve a break-in or other crime. In fact, unless I'm forgetting something, I don't know that I really know anybody that's had their house robbed at all (this is a privilege, I know)...

I do know other stories, though... Like somebody going downstairs in the middle of the night, gun-drawn because a relative got home from a trip a day early without telling anybody... Or somebody rushing home from work (armed again) because they got alerts from their home security system and couldn't access their cameras... only to find a Sheriff's deputy already in the house and... absolutely nothing amiss other than their kid leaving a door open.

And we haven't even started talking about privacy concerns.

Personally, I lock my doors at night and when I leave the house. If somebody wants to smash the glass in the french doors and walk right in, well, they're gonna be pretty disappointed in what I've got in there. I'm OK with that setup.

I know OP's question is about making the tech work in a safe way, but I can't help but wonder if all of the surveillance/security stuff is really necessary, unless you live in a high-crime area...

Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?

#55

Post by dkdk8283 »

wil421 wrote: post #41

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.

Ubiquiti products aren’t reliable. I live next to the ocean and the cameras last about a year. I had a POE switch in a conditioned space and it only lasted 2 years.

Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?

#57

Post by Zenbit_UX »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #45

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 Zo…

Wow this sounds truly impressive, the image recognition takes it over the edge.

What do you do for power sources to your cameras? I imagine with a setup like that you're not just using an AC cable to the nearest outlet plus some of those are outdoors.

You got some in wall wiring going direct to the cameras? How much time/cost investment would you say it would take for someone to replicate this setup?

Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?

#58

Post by troysk »

hiharryhere wrote: post #48
troysk wrote: post #20

I started by using a NVR off AliExpress. It worked well until I added a camera from a different vendor, same brand though and it refused to be reliable and had frequent disconnections. Moved onto ZoneMinder and after hours of setup I felt the UI wasn't good enough for a non-tech person. I want others in my family access the feeds with ease, ZoneMinder does not cut it. While I was experimenting with cameras, I was als…

> The Raspberry Pi also has Pi-Hole installed which I configured to block all IPs and domains being used by the IP cameras thereby limiting its access to local network only. You might have to be careful here. My understanding is that PiHole is just a domain lookup blocker so it won’t block a device which phones home with a straight IP address. Happy to be corrected.

You are correct. Sorry, I forgot to mention that I also have OpenVPN setup on the Raspberry Pi and the IPs are blocked using firewall rules.

Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?

#59

Post by Zenbit_UX »

uptown wrote: post #28

No cameras indoors. When I did have them (for monitoring a puppy) I put a camera on a physical switch so power could be completely cut when I was at home. For awhile I had this on a WiFi enabled switch, though I used a different switch brand than the camera to add layers that would need to be compromised.

I feel like nfid would be a good use case for this. Scan your NFID sticker when you arrive home which triggers a workflow to disable indoor cameras, and the reverse when you scan to leave.

Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?

#60

Post by 8fingerlouie »

I use a homegrown solution consisting of Raspberry Pi Zero W's with cameras, using the motion (https://motion-project.github.io/) daemon, saving their captured video to a NFSv4 share on a server.

The shares on the server are grouped so that each individual camera has a subdirectory of a parent directory, which is in turn shared by Syncthing to another local mirror and a remote mirror.

A python script runs on the server, using Pyinotify to detect new files, and using TensorFlow to do basic object detection, and adds bounding boxes to videos where it detects humans.

Finally a notification is sent through Pushover via MQTT (Mosquitto) when a person is detected, along with an image and a camera name and timestamp. It does presence detection by pinging our phones, so notifications are only sent if nobody is home.

If i should do it all again i would probably just buy a couple of Unifi cameras and a Cloudkey Gen 2 Plus and be done with it :)

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