I currently have a couple of (amazon) Blink cameras. I would like similar cameras but that are self hosted. Yes these basically are however the HW-Sync module sucks its slow. I’ve tried other chinese brands which are slower. I was about to buy the Eufy Homebase setup it seemed perfect easy low power cameras. However their “self hosted” solution has issues working with out internet.
It seems like there should be a selfhosted Blink camera replacement. I like the form factor of the blink cameras. The eufy were nice because they had solar options.
Anyone have any experience here? I’d love to use POE but Im too old and busy to run cable through my new house now.
Edit: When I say wireless I mean battery operated as well. Sorry, not just wifi.
I’m using Reolink E1 Zoom cameras. My router’s firewall keeps them offline, and I manage everything through HomeAssistant. Very happy with my experience on a budget
I looked up this camera and the reviews for the outdoor model with night vision seem pretty promising. Can I ask how you are using your camera(s)? Like do you have a local server to record the data? Can you access them with a cell phone without using any special apps?
Not parent, but Zoneminder locally with the zmninja app works pretty well. VPN allows remote access, so it is slightly complicated but not too bad.
I played with Zoneminder years ago but would like to get something set up for home security. I have a full internal network plus servers and about 60TB of free storage space so there’s really no limitations to what I could set up. Ideally I’d like to just hit a local IP from a cell phone to check the cameras (and remote access isn’t really needed), so that’s where I was trying to go with my previous questions.
The software side seems easy enough, but finding compatible IP cameras has been stumping me. I see the Reolink 4K TrackMix wifi cameras on Amazon for $130, and other than a few hiccups it looks likely that this piece of hardware would work, unless anyone knows of any “gotchas” that I’ve missed? Otherwise I’ll do a bit more research and then order one of the cameras to see how far I can get with it.
The only gotcha I can think of is the 4k bandwidth, better make sure you can handle more than one camera on your network.
Good point, POE might be the only choice then. Although these cameras do provide x264 and x265 compression so that would save quite a lot.
I’m using them inside. I record to microsd on each camera, and use homeassistant to view them. I’m eventually going to build a NVR for them
Ah gotcha, so you’re not trying to to live-view the feed on them. Thanks for the camera suggestion anyway, the brand still seems to be decent enough even if they don’t support Linux.
Afaik the reolink homeassistant integration supports live feeds. The integration seems pretty solid with a lot of features, though I haven’t tested them myself (I’ll probably get one soon to replace mine).
I got a dahua put it on its own vlan. It is powered and connected via Poe. I stream an rtsp stream to frigate for detection and frigate restreams to home assistant.
If you want a WiFi solution and a constant life stream you may experience degraded performance on your other devices but you have to check youself.
I was considering POE as an option, and this camera does have an ethernet port (although I can’t tell yet if that’s only for configuration or if the video will also stream over it directly). I don’t really need a constant stream and this camera also provides motion options so maybe it would only send video as needed (although during a heavy storm all of the cameras would probably fire at once).