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
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.
Reolink are easy and cheap enough.
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.
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.
