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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?

#91

Post by crispinb »

crispinb wrote: post #88
homonculus1 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No hostility but this is such a myopic, complacent mentality. In various places I've lived there have been burglars walking around casing the home, neighbors' houses getting broken into, and even a shooting right outside my stoop. I'm two or three degrees of acquaintance away from multiple people who've been murdered in home invasions. This is not limited to "bad neighborhoods", it happens in gentrifying areas and th…

I'm assuming you're referring to the US, in which case it's worth bearing in mind that your nation's violence rates are often well outside the norm amongst developed nations. I can assure you the only relationship I (or friends & family) have ever had with murder is via TV. I did have a friend who had been raped during a home invasion, but that was during a visit to the US. If I had to install special security equipm…

Too late to edit, so just to add: I'm well aware that the US is huge, regional, and diverse. The aggregate figures cover over much of importance, which makes it hard to compare as a whole to other individual nations. There are of course American communities as peaceable as anywhere else in the world.

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

#92

Post by cameron_b »

Orchid VMS Core [0] on Ordoid HC1 [1], 2 PoE cameras - turn off all the camera-based doo-dads

I use NAT to expose my web interface, Orchid marks motion on the timeline like most good video servers, and Orchid uses ONVIF / RTSP so it can use any standard IP camera

[0] https://www.ipconfigure.com/products/orchid - free on Arm

[1] https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc1-home-cloud-one/ - 8 core A15 / A7, 2G ram + SATA, GBE

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

#93

Post by phyzome »

wasdfff wrote: post #76
phyzome wrote: post #71

I'm not sure what the point would be of cameras inside my house, or of being able to watch any part of my property remotely. If I'm home, I'm home. If I'm not, I'm not, and there's little I can do about anything. We had some packages stolen, so I did put up a porch cam. It consists of: - An old laptop propped up vertically behind the front door - A USB web cam clipped to the door, looking out and down - sudo apt-get…

I have a little trouble understanding the mentality of surveilling the porch. If someone steals your package and you get it on tape, then what? The police aren’t going to do anything. Whoever sent you the package will refund you. It seems like both an unenforceable crime, and a victimless crime.

Victimless? Hah! Tell that to my young daughter who had a birthday package from her grandparents stolen, containing homemade cookies and some nice clothing.

"Hello Amazon? Yes, I'd like to get a refund on the package that my mom sent me. Wh-- no, listen... did you hang up on me?"

Anyway, the plan was to print out the picture of the thief and tape it up as a warning to not steal again, or find out whether the package was in fact delivered in the first place. Luckily, though, we haven't had any more thefts.

(I did end up catching someone stealing my tomatoes, and I later (gently) confronted her about it. She explained and apologized, we made friends, and she gave me some tomatoes from her own garden.)

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

#94

Post by alanpca »

Zenbit_UX wrote: post #59
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.

Presence detectors work well for this.

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

#95

Post by sliken »

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.

Indeed, if you control over DNS you have to advertise your own DNS server than blocking outgoing DNS requests for everything except you nameserver (UDP and TCP).

Sadly DNS over HTTPS takes this control away from you.

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

#96

Post by sliken »

benjaminends wrote: post #63
dbatten wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't really agree. I've had my car broken into twice, none since I pointed two cameras with bright red rings of LEDs at my car.

I find it quite useful to know when a package is left at my door.

My control system for lights can make the house look lived in, but is also really handy for controlling lights where they are hard to reach.

We have no useful front facing windows, it's quite nice to know when friends/family drive up for a kid pick up, visit, whatever without having to wait for them to knock.

It's nice to know when things happen, like a tree falling and landing on your house. Also handy if you have a surprise and your kid/wife/house sitter/plumber needs inside your house and your not there.

I just wanted to point out that home automation and surveillance have quite a bit of overlap and can be useful for more than detecting unwanted intruders.

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

#97

Post by sliken »

wasdfff wrote: post #76
phyzome wrote: post #71

I'm not sure what the point would be of cameras inside my house, or of being able to watch any part of my property remotely. If I'm home, I'm home. If I'm not, I'm not, and there's little I can do about anything. We had some packages stolen, so I did put up a porch cam. It consists of: - An old laptop propped up vertically behind the front door - A USB web cam clipped to the door, looking out and down - sudo apt-get…

I have a little trouble understanding the mentality of surveilling the porch. If someone steals your package and you get it on tape, then what? The police aren’t going to do anything. Whoever sent you the package will refund you. It seems like both an unenforceable crime, and a victimless crime.

It's nice to know.

Was it a neighbor, who just hasn't told you yet?

Was it a malicious theft... by someone you know?

How often do such thieves go by? Which car do they use?

What's the risk? Should you pay for a pakmail/pmb/po box?

Raising the bar to package theft, vandalism, stealing cars and similar can help reduce the chances of it happening in the future.

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

#98

Post by sliken »

alanpca wrote: post #94
Zenbit_UX wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Presence detectors work well for this.

Know of any good ones? I as all set to buy the nest protect. But turns out they are stupid and require cloud connectivity for any interoperation all all. No public API, no SDK, and basically useless.

Sad, the nest protect has a microphone, multiple networks, speaker, light, presence detection, alarm, smoke detector, etc.

I'd love to get the same hardware with a sane stack that will interoperate with my home not just today, but in 10 years as well.

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

#99

Post by sgt »

dublinben wrote: post #86
sgt wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand why people would want surveillance inside an apartment, but it's nice to have around your house. Even if it's just for the postman.

Why would you need or want to surveil your postman? Do they not deserve the dignity of doing their job without pervasive surveillance scrutiny?

Well, just to see when post or a package is delivered, and get a notification. It's not to surveil the actual person.

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

#100

Post by cameron_b »

allovernow wrote: post #5

That's an excellent question. I personally want something simpler - 4-8 CCTV cameras on a drive that gets automatically backed up to a remote server of my choosing. I suppose the only thing stopping me from doing it in Linux is getting CCTV output to the drive.

Try reshaping that question into "recording ONVIF streams to disk" as the task for the computer instead of the cameras doing the work.
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