Hello selfhosters!
I have what is hopefully a simple ask. I am looking for some outdoor cameras for my sister, who is not at all tech savvy. I am, to an extent, and I’d like to get her set up with a small, remotely-manageable system to view and record the outside of her home. I’d wager there’s a plethora of selfhost software that can be run on a number of systems (I’m thinking something cheap like a Raspberry Pi), to connect to an external HDD for camera storage.
I’m also looking for camera suggestions for this purpose. Wi-Fi cameras are ideal, since we don’t have the means to run ethernet for PoE.
Thank you for your time, and I hope you all have a wonderful week :)
Does she have regular 12 volt doorbell?
Get her wired doorbell camera this way no batteri s needed. And a large sd card.
I use tapo and it’s fine.
I hadn’t heard of Tapo, and while TP-Link scares me a little, it looks like it could also be integrated into Home Assistant for viewing. Does the camera record over the first-recorded data when the SD Card gets full? Do you use the TP-Link/Tapo app for local management? Thanks for your response.
Heads up: by default, HA does not show real-time, full-framerate video - just a snapshot that updates every 10 seconds or whatever. As with all things open source, there is a way to fix it, but you have to faff around. I haven’t bothered yet, but it’s on my list.
Thanks for this info.
I wouldn’t bother with a home assistant if your sister is non technical.
I use both xeoma with raw rtsp stream and tapo app. any app that uses rtsp should work
Just get her SD card and use a tapo app.
I have a couple Tapo cameras set up with HA, I had to use the tapo app initially to set up but once they’re set up you can ditch it and run the system entirely locally. I saw someone had a way to configure them locally too, but it wasn’t simple enough for me to bother and I was fine with the one time step.