I’m looking at dusting off my motion setup. It was an old setup to monitor what my pets are doing in the house with a webcam.
However, I need cameras outside to monitor my gardens and the webcams are not really usefull for that (for one, the’re not waterproof and USB cams)
I try to look for stand alone cameras, but can’t find a good test of them. (probably user error) Any tips on good, safe, cameras for outside? (pref poe, wifi when it can’t be avoided, not battery powered)
Thanks in advance
I’ve had a good experience with Reolink PoE cameras. They do RTSP and ONVIF and integrate well with Homeassistant.
Reolink + Frigate + Coral + Home Assistant has been the greatest setup of my self hosting career.
Thingino makes sure your cameras are yours and no one elses, they have a list of cameras that work with it:
https://thingino.com/This seems awesome. I have a couple Eufy cameras I don’t use anymore due to their cloud connection and Eufy’s past security incidents. At least one of my models appears to be supported. Those flashing instructions seem rather complex though. If you have any pointers, let me know. I’m still going to give it a shot later. Thanks for sharing.
Didn’t know this existed. Gives the flexibility to choose between different Hardware Vendors.
But do you have any experience on how easy it is to flash this to the Hardware and how good it works?
I flashed 3 Wyze cam 3s in like 15 minutes. I have 2 of them running 24/7 at the moment. They’ve been running for about a year now I think?
Reliability is generally good, I think I had to restart one of them once. One minor issue I found was it sometimes sucks at detecting low light. Not sure if its just an issue on the wyze cam.
Basically it will be pitch black and randomly decide to switch from night vision to non-night vision making the feed unusable for a bit.
Thanks sharing your experience! Does it also support the 2-way Audio of these cameras?
That I don’t know.
i am not sure what “stand alone” means but unifi protect is self hosted. amcrest can tie i to home assisstant
The only reason why I hesitate to recommend Ubiquiti cameras is even their cheapest offerings are kind of expensive.
And although you can run isolated from the Internet, managing updates is a bit painful. (Ask me how I know)
With “stand alone” is meant a camara you can use without suplier software (at home or in the cloud).
I just want a camera that I can use with motion. (unify has local software, but still you need their software as far as I know)
amcrest. i got it working with home assisstant
I think they mean a cam that doesn’t need to be plugged in through usb to work, like an ip camera.
They gave POE cameras that will just work with an Ethernet cable (although they gave weird POE requirements). Their USB powered ones are wifi connected.
Source: I’ve had them for years and am happy with the setup.
Reolink are easy and cheap enough.
Cameras are one part of the puzzle, but what are you planning on doing with what they output? If you want anything more than just instantaneously viewing what they can see, and you want to avoid their software then you’ll need an NVR or similar - I can heartily recommend the open source Frigate, which plugs nicely into Home Assistant (which if you’re not using yet, you may want to investigate further)
I currently have Frigate and an NTP server running connected to my main network and a camera VLAN which means the cameras can only talk to Frigate or my NTP server to keep the time in sync (or each other if they were desperate!) and currently a mixture of Annke & Reolink POE cameras, along with a couple of temporary Cinnado PTZ WiFi cameras for internal use whilst we’re away overnight to keep an eye on the cats, reflashed with Thingino as mentioned by another poster - I chose them as a gateway as they were dirt cheap and one of the easier ones to get Thingino onto, some require more extensive surgery. The WiFi for them connects onto a dedicated SSID on my camera VLAN.
When you start looking into it, there are lots of rebadging at different price points, like a variety of consumer electronics - the Annke ones I have are rebadged Hikvision at a lower price point, Loryta and Empiretech are Dahua rebadged etc.
