Server/Client DIY Home Surveillance

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Drizzt321

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  • #201
    Sweet! Managed to snag a Coral AI dual on ebay for not crazy money, and found this adapter board which will actually let me run both! Squee!

    And both are shipping fast, and I think I'll have the adapter board in early next week. If so, I'll have a chance to figure out PCI pass-through on bhyve (FreeBSD) and check to see if HA/Frigate pick it up. I certainly hope so. I might end up having to redo and have Frigate on it's own host, so I can have a big storage data drive for it. It's pretty annoying that HA doesn't have a good settings to easily mount from the docker host (e.g. my main VM which the dockers live within) to different mount points to more easily add on direct block storage as I want.
     
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    Drizzt321

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  • #203
    Ok then! Had to update the host OS from FreeBSD 12.2-13.1, but the PCIe passthru is working with both TPUs! Frigate is up and running in it's own VM since HA doesn't support multiple disks. I customized the ZFS zvol device a bit, disabled encryption and increased block size for the storage zvol for the Frigate VM.

    Frigate Proxy Add-On works just fine, and got a 2nd camera I now need to put up. Going to experiment with ESP32-Cam, an ESP32 based board which I can get one with a 2MP camera on it. My front door as a flip-up thingie and box with little grate for a "peephole", so I'm going to stick it in there to peep out the front. Not sure if I'll do battery or try and run some small white colored power wiring to the door frame edge. Definitely room for a 2-4 cell lithium pack, so might be fine as long as I remember to charge it up once a week or something.

    EDIT: Ok, there, have the 2nd camera up on my back fence into the alley, I think I need 1 ore and then I'll have good coverage across the entire space. Now just need to figure out a weatherproof open/close sensor for the back gate so I can have some lights come on on the patio when I come in so I can see better at night to enter through the back.
     
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    ptweasel

    ptweasel

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  • #204
    Sometime last year Wyze published a firmware update that allowed Wyze Cam v3 to use RTSP so they could be used with third-party NVR software. It only worked with the v3 cams and you had to manually flash the firmware on each camera. And, once you flash the RTSP firmware, you no longer get any further firmware updates. I've been using this firmware with my v3 cams for months so that I can use them with Luxriot, and it works fairly well other than some unexplained disconnects and reconnects.

    But, then Wyze removed the RTSP firmware claiming that it had "gotten old". Basically, "we want you paying for our cloud service and not using these as really cheap, really good dumb cameras." The firmware is still around to flash, but they no longer link to it.

    The entire point of using the v3 cams is that they're super cheap and have excellent image sensors. Even my good Hikvision cameras switch to IR at night, but the cheap Wyze cams look like it's daylight in the middle of the night.

    So, anyway, if you're reading this and using Wyze products I would suggest trying wz_mini_hacks. It works on almost all models of Wyze cams. Root access, RTSP, RTMP, Web UI for changing settings, basically anything you can think of. I'm using it now with Luxriot and it seems to be much more stable than the RTSP firmware that Wyze has disavowed.
     
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    stevenkan

    stevenkan

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  • #205
    ptweasel said:
    So, anyway, if you're reading this and using Wyze products I would suggest trying wz_mini_hacks. It works on almost all models of Wyze cams. Root access, RTSP, RTMP, Web UI for changing settings, basically anything you can think of. I'm using it now with Luxriot and it seems to be much more stable than the RTSP firmware that Wyze has disavowed.
    Click to expand...
    Yeah, all of my RTSP-equipped v3s go offline too frequently for my liking. I may try wz_mini_hacks when I get some free time. Do you know if it works with the garage controller? Or do I have choose, as I do with the Wyze RTSP firmware?
     
    ptweasel

    ptweasel

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  • #207
    stevenkan said:
    Yeah, all of my RTSP-equipped v3s go offline too frequently for my liking. I may try wz_mini_hacks when I get some free time. Do you know if it works with the garage controller? Or do I have choose, as I do with the Wyze RTSP firmware?
    Click to expand...

    I'm not familiar with the garage controller, so I can't comment. But, the biggest selling point of wyze_mini is that it's not a firmware in itself, it just allows new features to be run on whatever firmware you are running. It loads from the sd_card when the cam boots and doesn't touch the internal filesystem.

    For example, I'm running the latest v3 firmware (4.36.9.139) and still using RTSP without using the beta firmware from Wyze that added RTSP (4.61.x). Whatever firmware you have on the camera is still running underneath, the wyze_mini scripts just add more functionality through root access to the camera.

    There's an interesting discussion on the wyze_mini github about optimizing RTSP for the same reasons you mentioned. It seems that the additional load of RTSP overloads the camera, because that additional functionality is always running on top of the normal cam functions. The first thing I did was went into the Wyze app itself and disabled any functionality I wouldn't be needing since I'm offloading those jobs to my NVR (motion detection now set to the lowest, object highlighting turned off, etc). That alone got rid of the vast majority of drop-outs I'm seeing. There are still some, but they're very short.

    That leads me to the feature that I'm most excited about, which is USB Ethernet support. I know that may not be doable in your situations with the bee cams and stuff, but it could make a big difference for one of my cams that has ethernet available.

    When Google Stadia announced they were closing down, I bought a new-in-box Stadia Ultra kit mainly because I wanted the Stadia controller. People are offloading them for next to nothing right now. $25 for a controller that I prefer over the Xbox One controllers, and it also happens to come with a Chromecast Ultra that I probably won't use.

    But, the Chromecast Ultra comes with this USB micro power supply that has an ethernet jack on the power brick. Swap that out for the default v3 power supply, plug ethernet into the brick, and the camera disables wifi and works over ethernet. There's a list of other cheap adapters that work with wyze_mini, I just happened to have this one so it was a happy coincidence.
     
    ptweasel

    ptweasel

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  • #208
    Drizzt321 said:
    My Amcrest PoE RTSP cameras seem to have been working just fine, FYI, and they're not too expensive. Pretty good image quality too, even at night.
    Click to expand...

    I have one Amcrest in my setup, and I agree that the image quality is pretty good. Amcrest is basically just what became of Foscam, if you've had any experience with those in the past.

    Mine works, but the two issues I have with my Amcrest camera:
    • To access the internal settings of the camera, I can't just point my browser to the camera's IP address. It requires me to install a chrome app before I can log in and change things like resolution or audio codec.
    • No matter what audio codec I try in the camera settings, I have never been able to get NVRs to play any audio other than a horrible noise.
     
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    Drizzt321

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  • #209
    ptweasel said:
    I have one Amcrest in my setup, and I agree that the image quality is pretty good. Amcrest is basically just what became of Foscam, if you've had any experience with those in the past.

    Mine works, but the two issues I have with my Amcrest camera:
    • To access the internal settings of the camera, I can't just point my browser to the camera's IP address. It requires me to install a chrome app before I can log in and change things like resolution or audio codec.
    • No matter what audio codec I try in the camera settings, I have never been able to get NVRs to play any audio other than a horrible noise.
    Click to expand...
    I didn't find that first issue myself, worked just fine pointing my browser at the IP.

    I have sound recording turned off, California law. Two party consent for audio. So I dunno about the audio. I'm using https://a.co/d/atKXTad
     
    stevenkan

    stevenkan

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  • #210
    ptweasel said:
    I have one Amcrest in my setup, and I agree that the image quality is pretty good. Amcrest is basically just what became of Foscam, if you've had any experience with those in the past.

    Mine works, but the two issues I have with my Amcrest camera:
    • To access the internal settings of the camera, I can't just point my browser to the camera's IP address. It requires me to install a chrome app before I can log in and change things like resolution or audio codec.
    • No matter what audio codec I try in the camera settings, I have never been able to get NVRs to play any audio other than a horrible noise.
    Click to expand...
    I have bunch of Amcrest IP5M-B1186EW-28MM and IP5M-T1179EW, and they both work very well in BlueIris.

    I can manage either model, including viewing live video, from any browser, with the caveat that, on a Mac, the Setup can be a little janky to view, as the browser brings up the live view on top of the setup layer, requiring me to click around a bit to see the settings layer again. But this is an annoyance, not a malfunction.

    Audio is fine on my IP5M-T1179EW units. The IP5M-B1186EW-28MM units lack audio at all.
     
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    Baenwort

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  • #211
    So I'm rebuilding my home monitoring setup for my 3D printer.

    Right now I have 3 Pi Zero WHs with various cameras covering top down, bed level, and ridding on the nozzle. I'm using MotionEyeOS and sending directly to a MotionEye in a FreeBSD jail to do a combined webpage that I can view on various devices in the home.

    MotionEye is not keeping up with the raspicam replacement and OS updates so I'm looking at another solution.

    Any recommendations to start looking at? Primary limits are the Pis for the cameras and running in a FreeBSD jail.

    I'm willing to pay for software but hardware purchases are ixnayed for at least 6 months.
     
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    Drizzt321

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  • #212
    I've been using Frigate, plan on in the near future starting to pay for the Frigate+ which also let's me do more advanced upload/annotate to help him general better models overall, and general some models specifically for me, for example if a particular camera/angle combo keeps messing up categorizing something detected as one thing over another.

    However, the ML model detection can be done on the CPU, but it's a ton more efficient with a TPU like the OpenAI Coral TPU (comes in PCIe and USB flavors). With the Coral TPU, probably can run it fine off of a RPi, except for the storage part of it. The RPi5 with a PCie NVMe probably will do more than well enough.
     
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