Hey all.
So I was asked recently to look into security systems for their house. I was wondering if some of you have experiences, resources, and recommendations I can base my research on. What could be things to look out for?
Their basic requirements are: a window opening alarm; the same for the door; and a camera system with at least one camera, but maybe more (sorry for not knowing the technical terms of each… :P).
Now, I don’t want to recommend anything that relies on a remote server, especially not for the camera feed. Not only for privacy reasons, but I’m also afraid that the system is e-waste, if the service ceases to exist in the future (i.e. because the company goes away or the service is not profitable anymore). I also have some experience with setting up a home assistant instance with a camera and motion detectors, but I’m still a bit hesitant to whether I want to set up (and then probably also maintain and being responsible for it to work) their system. I’m fairly certain they wouldn’t be able to do that by themself.
Maybe there is such a all-in-one, offline solution already? I could probably get myself to setting up a Raspberry Pi with Tailscale or something similar, as this seems low maintenance and high reliability.
Curious to hear your opinions. :)
-mx
In my experience, any open source camera software is unreliable and clunky. To be honest though, a lot of cloud solutions seem quite bad too. What I’m talking about though is an old fashioned alarm system that has no Internet capability and just has a pin pad, a backup battery and a siren.
Yes, I actually thought about that as well. However, it does seem to be a bit more “intrusive” regarding laying cables, don’t you think? Also, I would imagine this to be a lot more expensive, but I might be wrong…
You can get wireless ones. You have to be careful though as cheap wireless ones can be insecure. It’s very much a get what you pay for type scenario