We are looking for a security system for our front entrance and side of the house, so there are 2x cameras needed. Not sure where to begin?
Home security system - outdoors.
antisocky on 13/04/2024 - 14:11
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If possible stay away from cloud requirements. Go wired if you have option rather than battery operated. Even if they are powered should be good.
Definitely recommend the EUFY eco-system for external/internal cameras/sensors and video doorbells etc.
No subscription required, can also be hooked up to a separate Homebase unit that can then use a hard drive up to 16TB for storage and also enables AI facial recognition.
The Solocam S340 wireless outdoor camera with dual lens, solar panel and 360 degree rotation is awesome.
Just wait for the regular specials.Yeah nah, Eufy are a little less than honest about their online safety & security, I wouldn't use them inside my house until I've read from third parties that they've fully addressed fully
https://www.theverge.com/23573362/anker-eufy-security-camera…
Lots of discussion online/reddit. Also check cheapies. This all has been resolved. It went to far by miss information. The risk was not that much. Bottom line, someone had to hack your wifi first to get into Eufy. So if you don't have secure home connection nothing in this world will save you.
Not advocating Eufy, they should have handled it properly but there PR team is shit.
It's a big subject, influenced by your budget and level of technical expertise.
I am hugely pleased with my $50 Imou cameras from AliExpress, plus Frigate running on an NVidia Jetson Nano. No ongoing 3rd party costs. No batteries. Awesome performance.
Today I would get a Raspberry PI plus Google Coral instead of the Nano.
If that sounds hard you might want to try Agent DVR or Blue Iris running on Windows (probably plus a Google Coral). Both are good. One is free.
Cameras with POE (power over Ethernet) are extra convenient because then you only have to run one cable. I actually use poe converters on the Imou cameras. Also, you don't need 4k cameras, especially if they are wireless - they just suck up bandwidth and cpu/gpu cycles.
Then you plug it into Home Assistant and make Alexa tell you when someone (but not a cat) walks up the driveway, and streams the video to the Android photo frame (before reverting to family photos once the person has done away)
If that all sounds too hard you'll want something fully hosted that charges a fee each month. I can't help there.
where do you get poe to usb converters from?
and which imou model for outdoors?
I have imou bullet 2c outdoors.
Poe adapters are "48V To 12V POE Connectors Adapter Cable Splitter" from AliExpress. Were $2.16 each when I ordered in Feb 2023.
They don't convert usb. Just remove the need for a 12v wall wart. Camera needs an Ethernet socket
Luckily I am fairly technically competent. main issue is having the time to get to put them in.
I'd go Eufy as well. No subscription fees which is great. Very easy to set up and they run on solar.
There are some great suggestions posted here already. But I think the question is how in-depth do you wanna get? What are your specific requirements?
I used to recommend WyzeCams, since they offer free cloud storage and it's a 2 week rolling storage hosted on their managed AWS S3 I believe. You also get the option to use microSD card and you can do continuous recording just fine. The WyzeCam v3 is suitable for both indoor and outdoor use and there are quite a few 3rd party addons you can get, such as window mounts or angled window mounts, solar panel addons, etc. You can also power the WyzeCam via a light bulb addon, forgot what it's called but they sell it on their site. The starlight sensor on the WyzeCam is pretty damn good, as it lets you see colour at night and it's quite impressive. Their motion detection is pretty accurate too. However, the downside is that their cloud storage only gives you 12s of recording and there's a 5 minute wait-interval until it'll start to detect motion again. This means that if someone triggers motion detect at 8:00am, then you won't get any recordings until around 8:05am. They could be in your house stealing stuff and out within 3 minutes. The WyzeCam v3 does come with a siren feature though.
If you don't mind this, OR if you just want to record continuously to microSD, then WyzeCam is probably good enough.
Alternatively, Eufy cams are good too and depending on the model you get, some can just do all its AI detection locally and store the videos locally. However, the problem with this is that the thief could just take away your hard drives or microSD cards.
There's also a Cheapies deal that got posted recently for some TP-Link Tapo cameras. You could try those as well since they're cheap.
Alternatively, you could get wired cameras like Swann and it provides floodlight on motion detect, siren on motion detection (or manually triggered), etc. The motion detection isn't as good as WyzeCam or other products, but it gets the job done once you've configured it properly. It can send snapshot images to your email and Dropbox and store the videos on its own DVR storage. The 4K cameras have pretty good quality and it's relatively affordable. But again, they could just take the DVR and you'll have no footages. Plus you'll need to wire them throughout the house.
Try to avoid anything that is powered by battery. If they are powered via solar panel addons, that may be a bit better. But if you want 24/7 continuous recording, or want all of the feature sets, then stay away from battery powered options. They always advertise lasting 6 months or whatever, but what they don't tell you is how restricted and limited some of its features are. Just think about it logically, how can a camera with such a small battery size last that long if it doesn't get capped on its features? Plus you'll probably have to mount them high to prevent people from stealing them or knocking them down, since most of these are probably just mounted via some magnets against the wall. If I want to break in and I notice these cameras around the house, I'll just get a long stick to try and dislodge them. If it's secured into the wall, it'll be hard, but anything that's mounted via magnets or whatnot will be easy to get off.
You'd also need to charge them every now and then, which means it's a chore/hassle. I much prefer wired cameras. They're permanent, one time setup and that's it.
The other option is to use your PC and use software like iSpy, Blue Iris or whatever to do all the motion detection and smarts for your cameras. On Android, you could use TinyCam and just run it on an old phone. The motion detection capabilities offered by TinyCam is pretty good and it has a ton of features. You could re-purpose an old phone and use its camera (which is probably more than enough) and mount it against a window facing out, then run all the smarts on it using TinyCam. Videos will be stored on the microSD card, but since you're using a phone, it means you can use apps like Tasker or MacroDroid or FolderSync to automatically upload the data to cloud storage. I have a 5TB OneDrive account that I'm using for free. You can get this using a Microsoft Developer account, which used to be very easy to get, but not so sure about it now. I just have FolderSync automatically upload videos every time it detects a new file in the target location that I'm monitoring. If you configure video recordings to save in 5 minute intervals or less, then you'll have a higher chance of making sure your footage is backed up to the cloud, before the thief even gets to break your phone or whatever. Not to mention you can add SIM card to a phone and add extra security to prevent it from being powered off.
The other benefits of using a phone is that with Tasker/MacroDroid, you can do an insane amount of stuff such as the use of shell scripts, system binaries like cURL, webhook calls, etc. You can extend the functionalities to a bunch of other things and get notified via SMS, Pushbullet, whatever. If you want friends and families or neighbours to subscribe to an event that happened at your house, it's very easy to send a SMS or any other form of alert to them.
Remember, your cameras are useless if you don't have the footage. If I was a sophisticated thief, I'd plan everything really well and the first thing I'd do once I break in is to take away all the cameras etc, because that means you'll have no evidence to link the crime to me.
At the moment, I've got a mixture of different cameras. WyzeCams, Eufy, Tapo, Swann, as well as my phones used with TinyCam, etc. It really depends on which properties I'm trying to protect, and what valuables I have in the house.
We now use Wyze v3 for all of our outdoor cameras, we pay the $30 a year for 14 day unlimited rolling cloud storage and person detection. Picture is impressive and the person detection makes it easy and fast to find an event.
FYI, you don't need to pay a subscription to get either of those. Those come for free as part of the Cam Lite plan, which you can choose to pay any amount you want. All my WyzeCams are set to Cam Lite plan and I pay $0. You get unlimited 14 day rolling cloud storage and notification is set to only when a person is detected via motion detection.
I'm guessing that you're paying for the subscription to get more features. The primary feature would probably be to get around the 5 minute wait interval after each recording.
Reolink POE + reolink NVR from Amazon (I think it's usually cheapest there) + hdd from Eastdigital. You could go blueiris or something for the recording software if you're comfortable with something like that, but otherwise the NVR integration is great. No annoying cloud subscriptions. Avoid batteries or just microsd storage (easy to destroy).
I've got about 10 wyze cams across 2 houses. They are cheap and so easy to cover a lot of area. Their free cloud service is really good but for about USD90 per year you can give more features to all of them (less if you want for specific cams only). I'm time poor so these suit me well. They've just released a cam v4 but the cheaper cams (OG, V3) are really good too.
I think v4 is just better camera quality but that's about it. I've got the WyzeCam v3 Pro which does like 2k or 4k quality I don't remember. I got it mainly because it says that the motion detection is processed by the camera itself using edge AI or whatever, kinda like how the Eufy cams do it these days. At the time I thought, oh nice maybe I can now finally get around the 5 minute wait interval limitation that you get with the free plane. I somehow thought that the recordings will be much more frequent and still stored in the cloud. Turns out, the recordings can't be saved to cloud, you have to save it to a microSD. To save it to the cloud, you have to go with at least Cam Plus I believe.
I ended up switching back to WyzeCam v3, because at least I get some recordings stored in the cloud for free. The thing with storing footage locally, whether on a NAS or HDD or microSD, is that they can be destroyed, stolen or become corrupted. I don't trust this enough. But the WyzeCam with the free plan by itself is kinda crappy, because waiting 5 minutes before it can do the next recording is just ridiculous, not to mention the recording only lasts 12s. So I'm just using a combination of solutions atm.
Anyway, newer != better imo. Obviously, a lot of this depends on your requirements, budget, skill level, etc.
+1 Arlo Pro or XL