I can do the same with almost any IP camera and even USB one with low latency and maximum quality the camera can supports. If anyone is interested in such setup I can do a quick write up about or maybe a repo with the configs needed.
I want to do same thing with smart plugs. There's not a single smart plug on market that won't connect to cloud to control plug from anywhere. I don't want to control from anywhere dammit. I just want control on my LAN.
If starting anew Thread is probably a better bet. Such as the Eve smart plug.
But with both zigbee/thread the problem is shifted towards the gateway instead so you'll have to do it yourself / pick one tu trust there. But here I think/hope Thread is going to have better interoperability.
And if you don’t want to deal with the hub potentially being your next issue, you can always throw home assistant on a computer / raspberry pi / whatever and control them locally. If you want remote access when you’re off your network, it’s up to you to figure out how to securely get the bits from your phone to your home assistant server.
+1 for Cloudfree. I don't know much about IoT but I bought 5 of their plugs and they literally took under a minute to get set up and running. Another few minutes to get data off of them and into Influx Cloud using Python.
I wish more manufacturers provided this sort of thing!
I'd recommend looking at Tasmota and/or ESPHome support list and getting one of those. Both are 100% open source and do not talk to any external servers. Some devices can be reflashed over-the-air and some need to be taken apart and flashed via a serial header. A few devices, such as from Athom, come preloaded with Tasmota. Tasmota has a list of IN-specific devices: https://templates.blakadder.com/in.html Here is an example of opening one up and connecting to the serial header: https://templates.blakadder.com/oakter_oak_plug_plus_16A.htm...
For the light switch in my room I slapped together a relay and a raspberry pi pico and a Bluetooth board (I think I saw recently that the pico w now has working Bluetooth as well?)
Now I can control the lights from my bed even when the LAN is down.
As others have said, look for Zigbee devices. I have an Osram SomethingOrOther, that connects to my Hue bridge, which isn't connected to the internet. Philips makes a similar plug.
The fact is that the Hue bridge supports connecting to a cloud for control from anywhere, so they'll advertise that since it's what many people are after. But it works perfectly fine offline, and you can manage it via Home Assistant, for example.
Shelly is pretty good for this. Their Android app really sucks badly but the good thing is you only need it for the initial setup.
Whatever you do, don't buy TP-Link. Those had local control but they removed it due to "security concerns" in an automatic update. And of course promoting their data mining cloud had nothing to do with it.
Other than every single one that uses zigbee/zwave and not Wi-Fi. You can also use services like Cloud cutter or select devices listed on the Blakader website of tasmota-flashable silicon. Or if you're willing to go a little deeper into the weeds, you can use ESP home for more fine-grained control.
I was gifted a new rando chinese IP cam that uses the mobile app. It's not googlable. I've been using as a outside security camera. The camera saves to an SD card continuously, and has a paid option to use the cloud which I did not take. It has a mobile app, KP WIFICAM, which lets me view the feed in real-time even over the Internet.
I can even view or download the past few days of recordings on the SD card from a menu. However, they are separated into chunks of 10 minutes, so I would have to manually download nearly 100 files files (tap, Download, wait to finish, move to next clip) to get a single day of recordings.
How could I automate/simplify the downloading of these clips from the SD cards to my laptop? How is the mobile app listing the recordings and fetching them?
I ran a tool called Agent-DVR and it found the camera feed using a format called ONVIF. So I think the mobile app uses this protocol https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29159422/get-data-from-l... , is there a tool like this available for Linux I could use without spending a couple of days installing a developer environment and writing my own code?
One simple workaround might be to get a wireless SD card? There are a few of these for DSLRs, where they have some (relatively small) amount of storage but come with the ability to join the network and share it via samba seamlessly...
If you have a device on which you can run my app (streamie.co), it’ll record your camera 24/7 to a NAS or S3 and write out .mov files (also ten minute segments), but they’d be trivially combined with ffmpeg. As long as you don’t need more than three cameras, it’s all free.
you should sell an application to manage many cams from a pc with a phone app to access it remotely.
The significant other has 4 different apps for cams. They each have silly issues, sd cards are to small and they all charge wild fees for cloud storage that they didn't disclose before purchase.
I can buy new ones but with the cheaper ones it is more likely a repetition of the mistake made 4 times already.
The software can be 6 times as expensive as the cams and still be entirely worth it.
What I also want is someone in a low wage country watching a wall full of cams cycling from one cam to the next. That service western security companies charge thousands per month for. Robbery right there!
I've got some Reolink Argus 2s, which are probably Linux under the hood. They're not set up to stream locally without an app, unlike their wired models, but there are likely functionality limitations due to being battery powered.
This would be great. Google sent out an email not long ago that they were discontinuing nest cams. Mine still works great but soon will become a paperweight, otherwise.
For something so critical as IP camera, I'm so frustrated that there isn't a single consumer product that you could use locally or without a manufacturer cloud.
I know we could use a setup with a raspberry, but I would like the usual nice functions of such a problem like: motor and a performant movement détection alerts.
All of that without having to develop all of that myself. I would easy buy the product 2 or 3 times the price we pay for current consumer products.
Sorry? There are plenty of PoE cameras that you can use and control locally without any cloud interaction.
I use a ReoLink camera controlled with Synology Surveillance Station ran on a local NAS setup. It allows me to pan the camera and it also has movement detection.
There’s many more advanced use cases you can use with local IP cameras. Just yesterday I purchased one of Synology’s “deep learning” NVRs which allows person detection, face recognition, license plate recognition and more on top of all the standard features (zooming, panning, tilting) with my local Domar cameras.
There’s a _TON_ of options available. Find any camera that supports ONVIF and they support a more or less standardized protocol for discovery and control.
All of my cameras are cheap Aliexpress ones that I have never let connect to the internet (nor installed any janky manufacturer apps). They’re on a VLAN where the only other device is a machine running Blue Iris to do all the camera stuff. It supports PTZ, very configurable motion detection, alerting (including just triggering external apps so you can wire up whatever you want to it), etc.
Total investment here is like $30/camera for the cheap PoE IP cameras and $80 for Blue Iris.
> For something so critical as IP camera, I'm so frustrated that there isn't a single consumer product that you could use locally or without a manufacturer cloud.
Pretty sure all the Apple Homekit stuff lets you do this
For those who are anti-cloud or want a 2-tier system for any good reasons, Been using this with several wyzecam V2 cameras for 2 years with no issues other than the cameras not being low light sensitive like the V3, otherwise the setup is pretty solid and fast.
Wyze V2 with Dafang-hacks have been super reliable in the past but these cams are now out of production with no reliable confirmation of this working with the V3s. I have been in the market for cheap 20-30$ cams like Wyze V2 with reliable setup like Dafang-hacks for a while but unable to find a good alternative yet.
I have been using wz_mini_hacks [1] on my Wyze V3 and have been pretty happy with it. Among other things, it has a “self-hosted” mode which patches the binaries running on the camera to no longer phone home to Wyze servers. I’ve been using it on my local network over RTSP with no issues.
I was not happy with wyze V3 but found reolink to work fine without internet, and Amcrest to be the best overall for being open and working without needing fancy software. I'd wholehearted recommend Amcrest except they don't have a very wide angle cam.
The issue with Amcrest and Wyze (and hundreds of other brands), is that they're just re-badging Dahua cameras, which are banned in the US. See https://ipvm.com/reports/ban-law for more information.
Of the lower cost and reasonably well-known names, the only brand that doesn't seem to be doing that is Reolink.
I run frigate (mines runs off their Docker image but you can use other alternatives like home assistant plugin). I also pair frigate with scrypted so you can tie the cameras into HomeKit. It’s pretty much the best of both worlds, online storage and detection using iCloud (if I trust a company when it comes to privacy, it’s Apple) and local storage and detection using frigate.
Not OP, but I configured a mosquitto server. Then a simple shell script service with 'mosquitto_sub' and ffmpeg to fetch the rtsp stream on motion events [0]. Somewhat crude, but it was only for a temporary setup.
Ftp upload, local storage and some that I dont mind being exposed are sending to telegram. Looking into frigate right now, guess that makes me a grandpa ;)
I've been using Agent DVR for recording, alerts and local storage though the alerts rely on a non-local MQTT broker (HiveMQ) due to the double-NAT setup my ISP imposes, otherwise I would have used a local Mosquitto broker. Here is a diagram I put together about my setup. https://i.imgur.com/mAmP9rA.png
Not OP but frigate works with any camera with RTSP. You can get Amcrest PoE cameras that are great quality that are around $50. Works without wifi or an app but someone in HN posted that the newer ones need an app? But I haven’t come across one and the newest one I got was about six months ago.
Frigate was a bit limited in usefulness until they added OpenVINO and TensorRT support in April. Trying to find a Coral TPU these days can be a bit of a challenge.
This tutorial is fiendishly thorough. Hats off to Bjorn for the sheer amount of time he must have spent developing this technique and then very carefully documenting it.
It’s cool and I get that there’s a certain element of hacker mentality, but given the seriousness of the use case, all I can think of is why?
Do you really want to rely on some firmware hack of a shitty D-Link camera to be the only thing standing between a robber and your stuff? You can buy a proper IP cam from Amcrest, Dahua or TP-Link for a few hundred bucks, wire it into PoE and have at least a fighting chance of identifying who stole your stuff. Anything less than a high quality camera placed in exactly the right place, and all you will accomplish is snapping a really blurry picture of your things being stolen, speaking from experience.
Unless a Nest camera is trained in Ninjitsu it’s not going to do a damned thing to stop a robber from stealing anything. Cameras are for monitoring spaces, in the best case recording someone doing something bad in enough detail it can be used in court if they’re caught. So long as the quality is decent and the camera successfully records an event, there’s little difference between a hacked D-Link or Nest camera in terms of functionality.
No difference in functionality, but in one case a manufacturer provides the desired product, in the other case a manufacturer actively pushing a non-desireable product to the market earns money. Which probably isn't the message we should be sending. There cannot be enough blog posts to offset that.
I've got some Nest cameras, the actual quality isn't much better than a shitty old D-Link camera I have. The Nest cameras have decent sensors but tiny primary lenses so there's a lot of pre-filtering before the video is even encoded. Fine details get blurred to shit if you actually try zooming on something like a license plate or logos.
The main difference I've noticed with the Nests vs older shittier cameras is their lenses have wider fields of view. So while the sensors have more pixels they're just picking up more background details vs more subject details. It lets them to have less precise positioning/aiming to cover a target area but they do t give you necessarily more detail on any individual part of the frame.
D-Link is also end-of-servicing many of their cameras, this means they disable the cloud service, rendering the cameras useless and forcing you to buy new ones.
I have a DCS-5030L that I am trying to hack. I already dumped the spi EPROM firmware and disassembled uboot using Ghidra to patch the secure boot.
There's still a lot of information visible through those circles. You might not be able to recover every bit, but that's not necessary with QR's built-in redundancy. So I too wonder how much data could be recovered from this.
You're not being rude at all! I didn't have a "problem" with the blacked-out areas, I was concerned about the ones that were clearly exposed without any redaction.
My approach with Network cameras with purely local network access has been to get cameras that support ONVIF (which many do), then hook them up with Netcam Studio https://www.netcamstudio.com/
After that I block the camera's IP address outbound network access, which should stop them dialing home.
You would make a better case if you would argue with objective evidence of malicious behaviour rather than a cry for ideological purity.
I don't know what Netcam Studio is nor what it does and I'm not interested in finding out since I'm not going to use it, but what kind of licensing it has would be the least of my immediate security concerns.
You missed my point: security is a process, not a product. If I don't trust a closed hardware/source camera, then why should I trust a closed source software, especially one that would have access to all video feeds, and if run on the main desktop machine also all data on the local network and the Internet?
You're right when calling for evidence, and I have none, but what if the software one day turns malicious and it's being caught only when the damage is done? Sorry, but the risks are too high.
As I'm OP in this, I can give you my risk decision. I block cameras from cloud access as they innately have this as a capability, the cloud systems they connect to are a target for attackers and hardware manufacturers in general are not well known for their software security.
I don't explicitly block netcam studio as, it runs on a windows host that I want to connect to the Internet for patches, it's a commercial product I paid a license for, so there's some incentives for the developer to maintain it, it has no innate cloud functionality, so less risk of hijack.
My risk profile is such that I'm not expecting directed attacks at me, I'm more likely to be caught up in a wider attack on a service.
I just use generic USB cameras (pick your quality) and stream over HTTP with MJPEG using ustreamer. Works surprisingly well, but you have to implement all the processing and storage yourself. All you get is a screenshot URL and a streaming URL.
I love this idea! All of my IP cameras just FTP to my server where they get immediately uploaded to my google drive. It works perfectly and it’s cheap but they’re still Chinese cameras connected to the Internet.
Is there a list of cameras that can be converted like this?
I wrote a custom FTP->GDrive proxy daemon for use by my scanner. (I wanted USB->GDrive, but it turns out my Brother scanner wouldn't allow me to override scanning parameters on its display for USB, but it does for FTP...)
Most xiaomi camera and white labels mostly work. I side load the customer firmware on a Yi camera and it’s been a solid wifi camera. The VLAN it’s on has zero internet access.
I've been struggling to find a way to do this. Seems like everything I find has removed any FTP/SFTP support and wants to send pics over LTE to an email address.
My goal is a simple weather cam that will upload an image every 1 minute. Simple as that. Old 2000s webcam style. I ran into an unsolved problem with my rPi3 and a Logitech cam and mostly gave up out of frustration.
Want something like this for my TP-LINK ones as well. Why the hell can't they have both local hotspot Wifi & the Bluetooth based setup at the same time.
For a self signed cert you can drop your local root server in the cert store when modifying the image. But you may not need to go this far, cheap clients sometimes don’t even check the validity of the cert.
