Home Automation

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Home automation is the residential extension of building automation.

It is automation of the home, housework or household activity.

Home automation may include centralized control of lighting, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), appliances, security locks of gates and doors and other systems, to provide improved convenience, comfort, energy efficiency and security.

Warning: Working with electricity can result in injury, property damage, or even death if it is not done properly. Please keep this in mind while assisting others. If you are not sure about what you are doing, hire a licensed professional.

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Cheap interior camera options? (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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We have a vacation home that we're only at once every ~6 weeks. I'd like to install two or three cameras inside the home which will upload a frame every 15 minutes or so, so I can look at these images from my home 250 miles away.

It's not for home security and doesn't need to be motion activated nor upload a live feed. We basically just need to see if any mice have moved in, if a bear or cougar have decided to sleep on my deck, or if a winter storm has caused a tree branch to smash through a window.

The place has full internet, a few desktop computers, and I'm an IT guy so I can setup whatever needs to be done. But I've been stymied by the apparent simplicity of what I want to do. I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars plus a monthly fee on a whole home security setup. I don't need to be able to remote control them either.

I want to hear about a bad snow storm passing through the area of the cabin, and then check some uploaded images to see if I need to fight my way up there tomorrow with a chainsaw and tools, or if I'm good.

I just want a few cameras, preferably connected via wifi, that snaps a picture and uploads it somewhere (Google drive, my home synology NAS, AWS, whatever) every 15 minutes. Indoor use only.

They don't need to be particularly high resolution, they don't need low-light capabilities, nothing like that. Hell, the 8 year old webcam I have on my desk right now that I use for Zoom would work fine quality-wise.

Any thoughts or ideas?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I just use cheap IP cameras, Frigate, and Tailscale for remote access. Monthly cost is zero, upfront cost was a Coral, I can check live feed and events whenever I like. Mine runs on a server I already had running, but I have an embarrassing number of cameras, and if I didn't have the server, I'd have just thrown Debian and Frigate on an unused computer. You don't have to enable the motion or object detection if you want only live feed; just don't put it in your config file. You can also control how long events (if you record them) are stored.