I’m slowly getting frustrated about the whole camera topic. For a long time I want to replace my 2 Blink cameras but whenever I start looking for alternatives, I quickly reach a point where people either tell me that:
a) the camera I chose is not compatible to my wanted software environment (HASS, Frigate)
b) I should use PoE
First of all, I want to have 2 or 3 cameras outside my house to check on the car or delivered packages, and maybe 1-2 additional ones inside to check on the laser cutter and 3d printers.
Thoughts on software:
Since I’m doing a lot of selfhosting, Frigate was often mentioned as great software for camera management, face detection etc. so I thought it would be a good idea to use that. On the other hand, people told me that Frigate relies on a constant video stream and so it seems like battery powered cameras are getting drained quickly.
Since my wife is starting to get used to HASS, I’d like to have the ability to integrate the cameras into it as well. This means that I might want to look at the live feed from within HASS or that I want to run certain automations based on movement / face detection.
I am not “against” cloud functionality so for me it doesn’t matter. I even think that having some independence of HASS for increased availability might be a good thing.
Thoughts on hardware:
I heard a lot of good things about Eufy but it seems like Frigate and HASS support is limited. Reolink also has some interesting cameras but I think it has similar downsides like Eufy. The cameras recommended by Frigate are mostly PoE, which is not an option for my use case. I simply have neither PoE at home, nor do I have LAN cables where I want to mount the cameras.
Questions:
Is my plan even feasible? Does using Frigate make sense in my case if I can’t use PoE cameras?
Or should I just buy some Eufy/Reolink cameras, use their detection mechanisms and integrate them into HASS?
Are there any cameras which fulfill my requirements and which are compatible to HASS/Frigate at the same time?
My experience with the reaction time of the Blink cameras is mixed. Sometimes I get a notification quite quickly and sometimes it seems like it takes forever. Especially the camera at my front door should be very fast so that I can clearly see who is walking around in my driveway. Is reaction time worsened by integrating into HASS? Or should I rely on the cameras own app/notification for such time critical use cases?
Does anyone have experience with Eufy/Reolink and is using them in a similar way like I explained above?
I know, but what am I supposed to do? I need a camera mounted to my garden shed for example. I have no power there and also no LAN, so battery is the only option. Constantly telling me to rewire my entire house including the garden is not helpful because of course I would do this if I had the chance to. In my personal case, I bought a 30 yo house and hardly managed to get LAN into the three most relevant rooms. Proposing to “just do it” isn’t helping.
Solar-powered security cameras come into my mind. They should be Frigate compatible. Take a look HERE.
It certainly is and makes sense. As for Frigate/HA compatibility just make sure the camera you gonna buy follows at least the ONVIF standart (which almost all cams nowadays do. Just check on the specs).
I use blink cameras and google generative AI (HA integration) - when motion is detected I grab 4 stills (0s, 1s, 3s, 5s) from the downloaded video and send them for analysis. It works well. This all works on the Gemini free tier.
Wifi is power hungry video is power hungry video on wifi is most power hungry.
So you’re asking very power hungry device to open a connection and stay running so frigate can analyze. You stand no chance from the start.
For frigate or nvr to work here you need the constant connection. Tamsys alternate option which seems more feasible grabbing some key frames for analysis.
But you still need power. Because wifi. I’d probably be looking at some sort of solar backed battery.
The other issue with WiFi cameras, in addition to power, is spectrum / bandwidth availability. At least where I live, only a few 2.4ghz WiFi cameras streaming high-quality video can quickly deplete usable spectrum, and begin to impact other 2.4ghz devices, so I only stream one at a time and only when I’m actually viewing it. If you intend to stream 24/7 over WiFi I would strongly recommend WiFi 6 or better over 5ghz or higher, which further limits your camera choices.
The compromise I’ve found, if you need to use WiFi, is to skip Frigate and use ONVIF-capable cameras with on-board storage and motion detection. These provide HA with a camera entity for streaming and separate motion (binary sensor) entity. The camera can record to its sdcard either constantly or just when motion is detected, preserving bandwidth. You can choose which clips are copied to the server (and when) for longer-term storage or analysis.
I’ve had decent success with Tapo cams, which support ONVIF standard, and have a fantastic hacs integration to sync clips and provide other local functionality. I can put them on a subnet with no internet access for better privacy, and link them into HomeKit for secure viewing when away from home.
Thanks, I have checked but Reolink battery powered cameras don’t seem to support ONVIF and Eufy does neither. I will have a look at the TP Link cameras though!
Besides, I have read all comments and I will check if I can somehow get power to where I need the cameras, but I will still need Wifi for data
I have 9 WiFi cameras, more than 50 WiFi devices and about 20 Zigbee end devices. “Useable spectrum”?? LOL. The WiFi and Zigbee protocols are designed to accommodate crowded spectrums. (As well as the fabled “interference”).
WiFi is a shared medium. Even though the “total” bandwidth of the spec is several hundred Mbps, you can’t just run many cameras at 20Mbps each; they will all talk at the same time and cause collisions which drop frames, cause retransmits, and exacerbate the problem. Prior to WiFi 6, spectrum was used less efficiently and as a result, most recommendations called for no more than three cameras streaming on a single channel.
I have over 70 low-traffic WiFi devices that work great, despite being located in a downtown city where the 2.4ghz band is fairly crowded. I can stream three cameras at once, but adding a fourth causes enough frame loss to go unavailable, which is roughly consistent with others’ experience.
If you can run 9 cameras streaming continuously on WiFi 4 or 5, I would guess either you’re extremely lucky to have clear spectrum, are spreading them across several channels, and/or have reduced the resolution/framerate to limit the bandwidth required. It’s possible, but takes some work. To anyone starting from scratch, best practice is to use wired cameras, but if you can’t, definitely use WiFi 6 which was actually designed for improved video streaming, so more devices can maintain higher bitrates thanks to OFDMA with MU-MIMO.
What I wanted to say is: Even if I somehow get power to my shed, there’s still no LAN and I need to fall back to using Wifi. Wifi reception there is fine, which is why I wanted to use battery powered Wifi cams in the first place, until people told that I should use neither
To be honest, I also didn’t make any progress in my decision. For one of the locations at my house (the camera pointing at my front door) I could actually drill a hole, pull a Cat7 cable through and attach a PoE injector. But for the other two that’s still not an option. If I buy 3+ cameras, I at least want to manage them all the same way.
To clarify, I think WiFi cameras are fine, just not streaming 24/7. Leveraging on-board intelligence is key to wifi cameras but even then, power is at a premium and batteries are still expensive.
The Tapo control integration for HA specifically calls out battery cameras as having “control only” meaning they do not support onvif rtsp streaming and motion detection. Many of them don’t even have real wifi, they use a proprietary hub. Apparently the c425 worked for a while but they pushed new firmware that broke it.
The Reolink integration does support some battery cameras that again connect to a proprietary hub. Checking these out might be your best bet, but again frigate seems out of reach.
The lack of any battery-powered products on the market supporting onvif-over-WiFi suggests it must be too power hungry to provide a good user experience (or a reasonable price point). Streaming 24/7 pushes that threshold even further away. You could always try to rig your own large battery bank and solar panel together, but it would be pricey, and may not work well in colder months.
I just stumbled over this thread as I also think about changing my camera setup to another vendor, as I´m not so happy with Eufy anymore.
Even though somebody here claimed this should also support your wished features by onboard intelligence (which is true for some but not all models), I have seen also comments in forums that HA integration is not so good (statements like “if you want to integrate with HA stay away as far as possible from Eufy” and so on), which I can to some extend confirm: I did integrate it years ago and never again touched it. Don´t know if this would work better now when doing it from scratch, as there have been also many improvements to HA itself on this, but how it is integrated now it is a mess, not reliably working at all. And also their inconsistent strategy of “this camera only runs with Homebase, this also without” is driving me nuts.
Even though I have no own experience with Reolink, many people praise their well integration in HA and contrary to another post before in this thread, I also see there ARE many options on battery driven cameras that do NOT require one of their hubs but work standalone in wifi network (like the Argus 3 Pro or Ultra).
Just wanted to share those thoughts and experiences, don´t know if you have done your project now already, @rohrbrecher
But still thanks for this post, it helped me a lot finding out if frigate would be also a way for me to go ahead - obviously not because I am facing the same requirements as @rohrbrecher
