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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?

#61

Post by troysk »

sgt wrote: post #43
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…

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 run it on a Raspberry Pi 4. No camera is directly connected to it. All cameras are WiFi based and it records 10 streams of 720p/15fps over RTSP.

motionEye can also be used directly on Raspberry Pi Zero along with the Raspberry Pi Camera but I don't use that setup as getting night vision to work on it a hassle and expensive, comparatively. It works though :).

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

#62

Post by wil421 »

dkdk8283 wrote: post #55
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.

I’ve had Cameras outside for a couple years and they’ve done just fine. My Outdoor Flex PoE switch has been working great as well. Ocean spray will eat a lot of stuff. I’m curious what you think is reliable for a salt environment.

My father in law has cheap Chinese cameras from Amazon that didn’t last 6 months. He also pays a monthly subscription for his Nest Cameras.

I’ll be installing a G3 Flex and an outdoor Mesh AP on the patio of a condo by the beach. We’ll see how long it lasts. Inside the USG and a Switch have been running fine.

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

#63

Post by benjaminends »

dbatten wrote: post #54
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 forgett…

Agree and to add one thing it seems to me like 90% of "smart" home systems whether surveillance or otherwise are always in a half-broken state. "Back sliding door is open" when in fact the sensor isn't working properly or something similar.

Great comparison to home gun ownership, it feels like a lot of money, technology, and energy put into protecting yourself from an extremely unlikely threat.

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

#64

Post by cjoelrun »

Tried out Shinobi, Motion Eye, Zoneminder, and Blue Iris. Ended up using Zoneminder due to easy mobile usage (not Shinobi, or MotionEye on iOS) and being docker friendly (not Blue Iris).

Hardware: raspberry pi zero running gstreamer rtsp streams. Didn't want to deal with all the terrible cameras phoning some random server.

Mobile App: zmNinja. $5.00. Worth it in my opinion. Motion notifications, event montage review, live streams, everything I need. HomeAssistant assists in enabling motion detection recording when our phones are not detected at home.

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

#65

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

Zenbit_UX wrote: post #57
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?

Believe it or not, it's not nearly as impressive as it sounds.

Most of my cameras are WiFi and the wiring is not run in the walls. My front door camera, for example, is actually an indoor WiFi camera looking out a window with its power cord running through a nearby closet to an outlet near that closet. My living room camera is mounted on a piece of wood that's clamped to a bookcase, its power cord runs behind the bookcase to an outlet nearby. The nice thing about having WiFi cameras is that you can move them around really easily. If I'm worried that one of the cats isn't eating, I can just put a camera looking at the food dish so that I can see what's going on.

My driveway camera is unique in my setup though. It's my only wired camera and it's powered via PoE, so all I need is an ethernet cable. I used an existing hole in the house, where the cable and telephone comes in, and ran the ethernet through that to the outside. From there it goes into some conduit for protection, then gets stuffed behind a piece of siding and run to where the camera is mounted. The mounting is similar to this[0] YouTube video.

It's really hard to say what it would cost to replicate it. My cameras have been acquired piecemeal over the span of 10-ish years. My Blue Iris server is a refurbished Windows 10 Pro (Pro is required so that I can manage it via RDP) business-class desktop machine that cost about $300CAD, Blue Iris itself I think cost around $70CAD. The networking gear is UniFi, but really the only requirements are that the switches and APs are VLAN-capable and that there is some routing/firewall sitting between the VLANs.

Beyond hardware, Blue Iris, and AWS, the software involved all open source. The biggest cost is really time, and it's really hard to put a number on it.

Setting up Blue Iris, tuning the motion detection, and building the Node-RED flows that coordinate it all took quite a bit of time to get working to my satisfaction. Tweaking the motion detection to avoid triggering on shadows from trees in particular is something I spent a lot of time on. It wouldn't surprise me if I spent a total of 20+ hours just trying to cut down on the useless alerts before I gave up and started using AWS Rekognition to filter the alerts. Cost-wise, I estimate that I'll pay about $5/mo for Rekognition once I finish up my free 12-months.

The VPN duties are handled by StrongSwan, I built configuration profiles for MacOS and iOS (using Apple Configurator 2 plus hand-tweaking the resulting .mobileconfig file) to do the connect-on-demand magic. The whole thing is backed by a PKI (internal CA, etc), complete with machine and user certificates for authentication. This whole setup is probably 10-20 hours worth of time.

Typing this all out, it sounds fairly insane, but the knowledge I gained during this process is invaluable. It also took place over a fairly large timeframe, so it doesn't feel like I've invested a lot of time.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjWkB0UZM1M

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

#66

Post by teknopaul »

bobochan wrote: post #27
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 am in the same situation. I felt a massive surge of anxiety just reading all of the suggestions here. There are locks on some of the doors from the 1940s, but to the best of my knowledge they have never been used and we do not have any keys.

I live in the city and prefer to leave the door unlocked. Cameras ensure if someone did "borrow something" I can get it back.

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

#67

Post by LeSaucy »

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…

One of the things keeping me on using Blue Iris is its use of QuickSync decoding for motion detection(which amazingly works in a virtual machine!) and Direct-to-Disk recording(prevents re-encoding streams for saved clips). With 6 1080p cameras it has really saved on CPU usage. I did not see any references to this in motion.

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

#68

Post by teknopaul »

Symbiote wrote: post #35
vdfs wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the point of surveillance, it's not always about bad things, and even if 99% of the time nothing happen where you live you my want to capture the some of the 1% moments. It's also useful if you want to know who came when you are not home or when you have delivery.

I think I'm better off not knowing who comes when I'm away. If they have any business with me, they know my phone number or email address, or they can write a letter. Otherwise, I'd rather not worry about the mysterious strangers. 99.99999% of them will be delivering pizza leaflets anyway.

Just because you record does not mean you view the recordings. You only look if something bad actually happens

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

#69

Post by blaser-waffle »

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.

No cameras are safer? How? You that worried about hacking, or liability? It's not hard to have a camera system that doesn't dial out.

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

#70

Post by teknopaul »

sethammons wrote: post #51
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 hi…

Yeah, security annoyances should be proportional to risk. No risk, no lock. Cameras are cool in that they are no annoyance, you cant get locked out of your own house because of a camera.
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