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We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

engineering.nanit.com

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Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#241

Post by varenc »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #195
varenc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I self host my "baby monitor" with UniFi Protect on UCG-Max and a G6 Instant wireless camera. It's more work to setup, but pretty easy for a techie. It has the "turn on the app anywhere and it works" feature, and with a 2TB SSD I get a month+ of video storage. Because storage is local, it doesn't need to compress the video and I get a super clear 4K image. And I use Homebridge to expose the camera over Apple HomeKit…

I unfortunately did spring for a Nanit, but am keen to stop paying the subscription... any pointers of a resource you'd encourage me to look at to try to the same thing you did?

Definitely! For self-hosted as a product I think Ubiquiti's Unifi Protect is easiest. (but there's free software options like Frigate)

You just need a console (NVR) and the a camera. Here's what I use:

- https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cloud-gateways-compact/c...

- and a wireless camera: https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/uvc-g6-ins

and the camera has a standard 1/4" female thread mount, so also a stand to hold the camera. And in the UniFi protect setting enable "Hallway Mode" to rotate it 90 degrees to get the length of baby.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#242

Post by varenc »

metmac wrote: post #178
varenc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I self host my "baby monitor" with UniFi Protect on UCG-Max and a G6 Instant wireless camera. It's more work to setup, but pretty easy for a techie. It has the "turn on the app anywhere and it works" feature, and with a 2TB SSD I get a month+ of video storage. Because storage is local, it doesn't need to compress the video and I get a super clear 4K image. And I use Homebridge to expose the camera over Apple HomeKit…

I came here to say, this is exactly what I do also. Unifi accidentally made a fantastic baby monitor. The recent APIs they’ve built makes me hopeful that I could run an AI model against the footage eventually and build those Ai features for myself.

I've been exploring this! Have tried Frigate and SCrypted. With their API it's easy to connect the camera to anything. Haven't got any useful AI models running. What I'd love is sleep tracking.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#243

Post by varenc »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #238
sbrother wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a happy customer, I picked nanit because it actually worked. We didn’t even use the “smart” features, but “you can turn on the app from anywhere you happen to be and expect the video feed to work” is unfortunately a bar that no competitor I tried could meet. The others were mostly made by non-software companies with outsourced apps that worked maybe 50% of the time. I wish we could have local-first and e2ee consum…

> you can turn on the app from anywhere you happen to be and expect the video feed to work if i'm understanding "anywhere you happen to be" right: Real question -- I'm not a parent. What is your use case for wanting to monitor your baby remotely from a different location than your baby? Obviously someone is with them at the house or location with the baby! You don't trust em? Or just like seeing/hearing your baby whe…

It's true! my recent real use case:

- I'm at a small party 1 block away. Baby is sleeping in the bedroom with mama but I'm trying to protect her sleep. I listen to baby with an airpod in my ear at the party. If baby shows signs of waking I come back and either bottle him or help mama feed him.

Also just because I'm out of the house and miss my baby and want to stare at him...

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#244

Post by varenc »

chrismorgan wrote: post #91
varenc wrote: post #59

In HN style, I'm going to diverge from the content and rant about the company: Nanit needs this storage because they run cloud based baby cameras. Every Nanit user is uploading video and audio of their home/baby live to Nanit without any E2EE. It's a hot mic sending anything you say near it to the cloud. Their hardware essentially requires a subscription to use, even though it costs $200/camera. You must spend an add…

> Every Nanit user is uploading video and audio of their home/baby live to Nanit without any E2EE. It's a hot mic sending anything you say near it to the cloud. Your way of phrasing it makes it sound like it would be fine to upload the video if it were end-to-end-encrypted. I think this is worth clarifying (since many don’t really understand the E2EE trade-off): E2EE is for smart clients that do all the processing, p…

It's true. But nanit only gives you things like sleep insights if you buy their $200 stand and pay for a bigger subscription. Many users aren't making use of this. They do provide motion alerts, but those could happen on device.

Apple has done some interesting this with privacy-centric cloud processing. Might be some way to eventually get the benefits of cloud based detections without revealing your video.

also my other gripe is they also store audio. Which personally I feel like is even more sensitive. Wish their was an option to allow live audio listening but not store any audio in the cloud.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#245

Post by varenc »

cbg0 wrote: post #82
varenc wrote: post #59

In HN style, I'm going to diverge from the content and rant about the company: Nanit needs this storage because they run cloud based baby cameras. Every Nanit user is uploading video and audio of their home/baby live to Nanit without any E2EE. It's a hot mic sending anything you say near it to the cloud. Their hardware essentially requires a subscription to use, even though it costs $200/camera. You must spend an add…

> Self-hosted video isn't that hard Self-hosting video is not something the typical user of a baby monitor would ever even consider.

I meant more that in the abstract technical sense it's not that hard of a problem, but I agree that given the options available to consumers it is hard.

If UniFi Protect was re-skinned and had a bunch of its security camera complexity removed and optimized for the baby-camera use case it'd be normal consumer level friendly.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#246

Post by varenc »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #231
theanonymousone wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is indeed far more of a "HN Style" comment.

It calls back the classic, "you can already build such a system quite trivially": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Hah never thought I'd be compared to that legendary comment! It hits home for me because I worked at Dropbox for years. I did at least qualify that I couldn't in good conscience recommend my setup to non-techies :)

If you don't want a baby camera system that's also a part-time hobby...Nanit does seem like the best option. I just lament that the best option requires giving up so much.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#247

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

varenc wrote: post #241
ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I unfortunately did spring for a Nanit, but am keen to stop paying the subscription... any pointers of a resource you'd encourage me to look at to try to the same thing you did?

Definitely! For self-hosted as a product I think Ubiquiti's Unifi Protect is easiest. (but there's free software options like Frigate) You just need a console (NVR) and the a camera. Here's what I use: - https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cloud-gateways-compact/c... - and a wireless camera: https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/uvc-g6-ins and the camera has a standard 1/4" female thread mount, so also a stand to hold…

Thank you so much!

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#248

Post by jen20 »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #231
theanonymousone wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is indeed far more of a "HN Style" comment.

It calls back the classic, "you can already build such a system quite trivially": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

You really can trivially do UniFi protect. Barely even have to know networking. I have it along with vtech monitors, works flawlessly.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#249

Post by jen20 »

varenc wrote: post #244
chrismorgan wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every Nanit user is uploading video and audio of their home/baby live to Nanit without any E2EE. It's a hot mic sending anything you say near it to the cloud. Your way of phrasing it makes it sound like it would be fine to upload the video if it were end-to-end-encrypted. I think this is worth clarifying (since many don’t really understand the E2EE trade-off): E2EE is for smart clients that do all the processing, p…

It's true. But nanit only gives you things like sleep insights if you buy their $200 stand and pay for a bigger subscription. Many users aren't making use of this. They do provide motion alerts, but those could happen on device. Apple has done some interesting this with privacy-centric cloud processing. Might be some way to eventually get the benefits of cloud based detections without revealing your video. also my ot…

Then you’d have to trust that the option does what it says on the tin. My default for companies besides Apple is not to, too many scumbags have poisoned the well.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#250

Post by dxxvi »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #210
dxxvi wrote: post #40

So, you want a place to store many files in a short period of time and when there's a new file, somebody must be notified? Have you ever thought of using a postgresql db (also on aws) to store those files and use CDC to publish messages about those files to a kafka topic? In your original way, we need 3 aws services: s3, lambda and sqs. With this way, we need 2: postgresql and kafka. I'm not sure how well this method…

Like put the video blobs themselves in postgres data columns? Does putting very large (relative to what you normally put in postgres) files in pg work well? Genuine question, i do not know, I've been considering it too and hesitant about it.

I already checked with AI before putting the comment :-)

1GB with the bytea data type (https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-binary.html) and 4TB with the BLOB data type (https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/BinaryFilesInDB).

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