Partly because of your help, I now have a pretty decent HA set-up with lights and motion sensors. I was wondering if I could again pick your brain/ experience with the next step I need to take: add a camera.
A few days ago I bought a TAPO camera, and to my disappointment it was practically impossible to get it working without an app + account. Luckily I could return it.
I now want to avoid making the same mistake 😬 And I would love to hear how you approached this.
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I’m happy with Reolink, but I keep them entirely isolated. Only allowing traffic in (ha to the camera) NTP to my firewall. The plugin for HA seems pretty good.
There is thingino and openipc, which are alternative firmwares for a bunch of afforable ip webcams. Which make them work without an account and be integratable into homeassistant. Would recommend those. The WUUK Y0510 is pretty easy and has a good specsheet/price ratio And there are some installers which make it as easy as writing an image to an sd card.
There’s also reolink intergation with homeassistant Reolink - Home Assistant
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I use Raspberry Pi Zero W’s with the cheapest wide-angle USB cameras I can find. PS3 Eyes used to be (pre-covid) ridiculously cheap on eBay (like $6 each if you could find them in the bulk packaging). I dunno if you’re gonna find anything that cheap in 2025, but if you can find PS3 eyes on the cheap, they get the job done (but don’t work great in low light). Mine (about 8 total) have been running well for about 7 years now, some indoors, some outdoors (mounted strategically to avoid rain and heavy wind).
You can install Raspberry Pi OS (or your lightweight distro of choice) on each Pi and then install the Motion package, which supports pretty much any USB camera out of the box, and lets you set up things like motion detection, image capture, live streaming, etc with a little configuration. If you’ve got HA running smoothly, I suspect you’ll be able to tackle setting up a few Motion configurations. You just SSH into each headless Pi and configure Motion to start in daemon mode so it’s always running whenever the Pi boots. You can then access the camera feed remotely from the Pi’s IP address with an address like http://<local.ip.address.>:8080
A bit of work to set up (and maybe more expensive than cheap, cloud-based, AIO systems), but it’s incredibly worth it to have a wholly cloudless, entirely local security/nannycam solution.
A finished Pi Zero W + camera unit has a pretty small footprint, and can be mounted just about anywhere within distance to a power outlet with some velcro if it can’t just be sat on a table or something. My units typically look like this:
Though this one uses a Ubisoft camera (didn’t wanna take down a PS3 eye for this pic so I pulled my crappiest unused USB cam from the closet. This camera is awful, but I got it for free so I can’t complain, lol)
Thanks a lot for your extensive answer. I’m going to check things out!
I think I’m going Ubiquity, which isn’t entirely platform agnostic, but should work with Frigate just fine afaik. Would love if someone could confirm.
Are you looking WiFi or lan is OK as well? I’ve found PoE works decent for this scenario (initial setup through web server running on camera). I used Amcrest with PoE (put them on subnet without internet access), they have rtsp out of the box, integrates no problem with frigate. Reolink rtsp is not out of the box with frigate but cameras worked out of the box on PoE.
Doorbell (amcrest) is connected to WiFi however it needed app for initial setup.
Certain Wyze cameras, Unifi, Reolink (I find these suspect though), Eufy (same thoughts as Reolink).
Dig in and see what others say. Most of the US made brands are for higher end security or NVR/CV applications, meaning not cheap.
What model did you buy/return?
I’m using multiple Tapo cameras and although I had to set up an account initially for configuration, that account is only used when I want to actually change camera configuration. Unless I need to do that the cameras are completely blocked from the Internet.
They work fairly well with RSTP on Frigate & Home Assistant although they do lock up once in a while, but they were only $15. If I remember correctly not all TP-Link’s cameras support RSTP and the company is terrible at documentation, so making sure you buy a camera that supports the protocol isn’t all that easy.
I also have Foscam and Dahua cameras and they have been bulletproof.
I have had good luck with Hikvision. Better than the one Reolink I have.
I actually have a lot of TAPO cameras. Although you need an account initially to set them up. After you set them up you can block them from accessing the internet and even delete the app if you’d like.
I’m using them with BlueIris but I’m sure you can use them with other other NVR software.
