Starting to think about setting up my home camera surveillance system and what to avoid making poor decisions, so need to tap into community experience ... you guys :-)
Frigate seems like the direction to take if I want to strike a good balance between cost, integration and reliability. Hardware is a key issues. I could install HA and Frigate on my VM running on my Truenas server but I feel I'm putting all my eggs in one basket so thinking of having a dedicated machine for HA + Frigate. The Frigate website advertises this little beasts with a Coral PCIe unit. That about 300€ if I'm lucky, but I could live with that.
For camera I definitely do not want chinese-call-home/cheap stuff. The Lorytas advertised on the Frigate website seem to be difficult to get hold of (are these not chinese btw?) in Europe so was wondering what other peoples experience is. Cameras need to be comparable to these Lorytas in terms of quality and functionality (no chinese, no call home, good image quality, good relibility, weather proof)
Keen to hear whether others have tried the hardware/setup recomended on the Frigate website and whether there are people out there that have actually got even better setups.
This guy is recommending that the Frigate unit is separate from the HA unit. I'm unlikely to have more than 5 cameras installed and it feels a bit overkill to have two separate machines?
This might not answer all of your questions and I only have very small number of cameras, but I would recommend to buy any IP Camera that supports RTSP and then create a seperate VLAN or LAN for the cameras to not be able to phone home or anywhere else. I actually have a complete isolated smarthome network using a opnsense Router and it works Quite well and at least feels safe.
Another way could be to invest in unifi / ubiquiti cameras, they have a good Reputation. Integration in frigate or homeassistant I dont know.
I'll hop on this. I lot of the cheaper cameras ONLY have cloud connectivity, which is not what you want. You specifically need to look for RTSP cameras, and shy away from any that are overpriced because they provide "AI" bullshit onboard. You can use Frigate to do inference to detect objects and events if you wish, so don't by the default of having that on the camera.
Edge AI inference is very valuable, just not in this context.
It never really is in most contexts though 🤣
True, especially if it's oriented at a consumer and not commercial.