A while back, I had the need to remotely monitor a house while it was under renovation. A few friends of mine recommended a particular brand of highly-advertised security system. It was not cheap. As I was setting it up, I found out that most of the features that I wanted required broadband internet. This was not disclosed in ANY of the marketing materials. This house didn't have Internet and I wasn't going to purchase it because it would have been $60 minimum on top of the $40 or so the security system was going to cost.

What I did instead: I bought a Raspberry Pi camera, hooked it up to a RPi Zero 2W that I already had, bought an LTE hotspot and a $5/mo prepaid SIM from T-Mobile. On the software side, I used imgcomp (https://github.com/Matthias-Wandel/imgcomp) to take a photo every second and save it to a RAM disk. If the two pictures differed (modulo noise), the Pi would upload the changed picture to a directory on my VPS, which would then trigger a notification to my phone via Gotify containing the link to the picture.

It was all very Rube Goldbergian but it worked quite flawlessly for a couple of years.

I was working on a similar think a while back [1]

I was living in an apartment while building my house. My idea was to have a camera making a time lapse video with the secondary effect of being able to be accessed by me from the internet so I can take a look at how the crew was doing. Unfortunately every single ideia that I have is already had and developed by anybody else. In this case, china. Ali express have some pretty good cameras that does that and more; with a better finish then a 3D print shitty case...

1 https://youtube.com/watch?v=5E7_40PWqiQ

An alternative project I was looking to use with my Raspberry Pi Zero WH's was mediamtx.

https://github.com/bluenviron/mediamtx?tab=readme-ov-file#ra...

nice use of WebRTC, which somehow is still underutilized.

>If you're self-hosting and you want to access the signaling server remotely via mobile data, you may need to set up DDNS and port forwarding if your ISP provides a dynamic IP.

this also exposes your server to the internet. instead you can use one of the open source solutions which creates a private connection between your Pi and server (so there is no network access to the server - make it unreachable), and doesn't require static IPs or port forwarding.

> Raspberry Pi 5 [...] do not support v4l2 hardware encoding

I'm not sure I get the point of that... they go through the effort for video decoding, but why doesn't it have an encoder?

I recently built an always-on recording device, primarily for recording audio consistently and constantly - this is not for surveillance purposes, but rather for musicians and creatives who don't want to have to remember to press the Record button in the middle of a great performance. I used the Zero-W and some tricky shell scripts pushing arecord/aplay around, with a turboLua front-end, and .. it works pretty well!

I set it up to record continuously, deleting audio content only once it gets 'stale' as per the users preferences, with options ranging from 1 minute - 5 minutes - 15 minutes - 30 minutes - 1 hour - 3 hours - 5 hours - 24 hours .. and built a front-end to allow the user to Keep the time-period they feel they might have captured something great. This heuristic is somewhat similar to the deadman-switch/security-camera mechanism used in a lot of surveillance products.

It works so well, I kind of wonder why its not really a standard already. I guess there is still a kind of 'economy preference' where folks don't really want to fill up their storage space, but these days 128Gigs can go a long way.

I'm pretty sure this heuristic should become a norm, one of these days. Its so inspiring to set up, forget, and then - after a few hours of jamming - come back and find the stuff you want to keep, having all the rest of the house-keeping done for you.

Neat, I was looking for exactly something like this to run person detection! I'm using yolov3-tiny, not quite a new but very lightweight computer vision ML model, and just right now I'm trying to maximize performance of inference with C++, to perform real-time person detection around my house (I want to know when someone enters the parcel at night so a siren and lights can turn on automatically to deter the intruder) - https://github.com/jmaczan/yolov3-tiny-openvino

Let's not forget the old RPi Cam web interface project. It's a really old one but it's still running on my Pis. It's running in a perinneal environment so it doesn't ruin the SD card it's on, while saving to a server. The interface is also neat. https://elinux.org/RPi-Cam-Web-Interface

I've been using https://github.com/TinkerTurtle/Sentry-Picam for a similar purpose with great success. The recorded images/videos folder is syncing up with 3 other machines for redundancy using syncthing, and I hooked-up a push notifications script based on sendxmpp to have alerts on all my devices in real-time if something happens.

This is very cool, I had worked on something similar back at https://securade.ai using a Nvidia Jetson as the edge device. I am now excited about reCamera - https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/recamera/

I'm interested in doing something similar, except using a board with open-source firmware. What kind of options do I have (if any)?

If I just want to record sound, is webrtc a good solution for that?

very small amount of code to make a functional webrtc implementation.

Very nice to be able to see how to do this C.

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