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 :)

  • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    4·
    24 hours ago

    This is not inexpensive ($500-1300+ easily depending on number of and quality of cameras) but it’s what I use and can recommend

    Also no cloud with reolink is an asterisk situation. Out of the box with the reolink app for several of their cameras it will contact reolink servers for things like notifications. However you can config with app and then never use again. If you have some of the fancier cameras like the e2 pro or whatever the notification processing is thankfully not server sided but occurs on the camera so you can roll it into home assistant and do everything locally

    To OP keep in mind this gets computationally expensive as well depending on your goals. If you just want 1-3 720p streams in the home assistant app then a pi is probably fine, especially if it’s like a pi 5. But if you want to encrypt those streams and forward them to homebridge so that less tech savvy users in your home can just view the streams on the home app in their iphone, you have like 10+ streams that are 4k, etc you’ll find the pi will choke and it may make sense to offload to a more powerful server or NVR (but if you want the homebridge thing even the nvr won’t save you)