I live alone and my neighbor found some drunk and/or high folks trespassing on my property while I wasn’t home the other day. I want to put up cameras as a safety thing, but I hate Ring.
I’m a broke botch rn too, so the subs for the cameras or whatever can’t be crazy.
If you have an old PC or laptop and are willing to take time figuring things out, a basic Frigate installation is free. I run it with Home Assistant and it provides completely customizable notifications to my cell phone with no cloud storage or servers required outside of some kind of SMS or push notification account.
Lots of cameras are compatible, but for a truly cheap option, TPLink cameras ($20) can be mounted inside your windows (with a very minor modification) as long as you have dim exterior lighting at night. I have 3 of these installed and they work fine the vast majority of the time.
Reolink is easy to DIY, has sane privacy policies if you want to use their web services, and they support self-hosting your own streaming + recordings if you don’t.
They’re the usual rec in these threads, and with good reason.
+1 I’m happy with my Reolink. I’ve got them blocked from the Internet and they still work. Works well with HomeAssistant, Scrypted into HomeKit (slowly), and frigate by accounts online.
So there’s no subscription? I might have to look into one. We had one from Seeing, which which we found at a bin store and figured we’d try. It worked fine, but after a year they wanted a subscription fee so we gave up on it.
The subscription is only if you want cloud backup of recordings as far as I’m aware.
Mines blocked at the router but I unblock it when I go on holiday. Can still view SD recordings. Never had any issue.
I think they offer cloud, but no, once you buy the camera you can either have it on a local server to store video which they also sell, or just have it on the local network with smartphones able to use an app to monitor it from anywhere. Or, just have them not connected, and pull the storage card when you want to see captured history (a pain, but doable). I’ve only used the lower tier, and they’re not too bad. Can’t say if the higher priced ones are a lot better or not, but they do offer a lot more features.
Look for random no-name cameras that support “ONVIF” and keep them firewalled away from the Internet.
Eufy, they have local storage too
Respect other peoples privacy. Make sure the camera only covers your own property, and not the public street or sidewalk.
Public areas are public.
Fuck that! “Public” is not the same as “panopticon,” but that’s what pervasive surveillance cameras turn it into!
I have mine pointed down from neighboring houses but they do cover the sidewalk and street which can help in the event of a break-in or crash. They also run through frigate in addition to my NVR and in that I have the sidewalk and street masked off so I only get notifications for people coming on my property. This way the sidewalk and street is being recorded by not viewed unless something happens.
I’ve been using the Eufy Security ecosystem, which stores video locally, usually on MicroSD cards or a hub device with built-in storage. And there are zero monthly fees. It has a pretty good app for accessing everything remotely. The devices aren’t super cheap but the prices aren’t crazy either, I think they’re good products for the money.
I got like 4 for $50, I’d call that pretty cheap… 3k sensor isn’t amazing but it’s good enough for our purposes.
If you want 100% control and keep everything local FrigateNVR and the POE cameras of your choice. You can find used hardware online and pick and choose where you want to spend more cash. To save space for recordings a gpu or tpu/npu can be used for object detection.
https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted is a good place to search for some information and help.
I’ve heard good things about Flock.
Would a camera stop someone from trespassing on your property?
Fake cameras are just as good as real ones for preventing people from trespassing.
helps piece of mind when youre away. also checking whats going on outside without getting out helps.
I use the cheap ones on Amazon that require no subscription and use an app called CloudEdge. They’re limited, but they take video and send notifications on motion quite reliably and you can get a live look through them anytime anywhere. They’re like $30 and I’ve already had two for over two years without issues. App bugs you to upgrade/AI, but is easy to ignore. Might be sending secret info to the Chinese government about how often the post arrives, but I only use them outside anyway.
