New Setup with Homekit and cameras -- help

Configuration
1

I am building a house and would like some advice before I buy a bunch of the wrong equipment. Hopefully I am posting this in the right place.

As background, my current house has an old HAI Omni system that talks to the lights and thermostats. A while back I added a Homeseer hub that talks to the Omni and then added homebrige to interface with Homekit so I could use voice commands. Then I added some Eufy cameras that talk to Homekit. The cameras can trigger automation when they detect motion. It all works surprisingly well.

I want similar capabilities in my new house but I want to use POE cameras. I am thinking of Reolink because they appear to output the proper streams (ONVIF etc.) and have motion/person detection built in, although they don’t talk directly to Homekit like the Eufy ones do. I am not interested in recording everything 24/7 so I don’t think I want an NVR; I just want to detect motion, trigger automations and record snips. I’d also like to have a music server, maybe with Roon. I will probably have a Lutron lighting system, which I believe HA can talk to. It also needs to talk to a wired alarm system so it knows when doors open and close etc.

It appears that the simplest way to start is to install Home Assistant on a Raspberry PI or Home Assistant Yellow and then add Homebridge to interface with Homekit. Then I would need an add on or integration for the cameras. However, I am worried that the cameras will be too much to run on that hardware.

So, I thought of buying a NUC with an N100 or even a Core I5 processor with the power to do everything. This is where it starts to look complicated (for me at least).

It seems like I might have to install Linux, create a virtual machine for HA, something else to record snips when the cameras detect motion, something else for the music server, something else to interface with the alarm system (although maybe HA can do this with Konnected), and then something to make these separate things talk to each other (Proxmox?). (I feel like I am speaking in tongues here.)

Please keep in mind that to me Linux is Lucy’s boy friend, Docker is a pair of pants, Frigate is a boat, and Proxmox sounds like something you would rather not go through during a physical. (Well, its almost that bad.)

What is the best way to accomplish what I am trying to do? Thanks.

1 Like
2

Since I haven’t gotten any response I thought maybe my original post was too long winded. Please let me try to state my questions more concisely.

I want to use exterior POE cameras (probably Reolink) to detect motion, trigger automations like turning on the porch lights when people come around my house, and record the video while motion is detected. I would think this is a pretty common thing to want to do so people must have experience they can share.

I am concerned that these cameras will be too much overhead for a Raspberry Pi solution. If I spring for something like a NUC, I feel like I should be able to do more with it than just run Home Assistant. So, what I would like advice on is:

  1. Am I right that a Raspberry Pi may be under powered for this and if so, what hardware do you recommend?

  2. What is the best way to set it up? I have read discussions of using Proxmox or VM Ware to create virtual machines so they can run HA and something else on the same hardware. Some people seem to like Blue Iris, but that is a Windows program. Some people like Scrypted and use it to interface with Homekit or HA. (Could I use Scrypted to pipe the video to Homekit and then Homebridge to connect that to HA?) I think there is a Home Assistant plugin or integration for Reolink and maybe a more general one for ONVIF streams. All these different possibilities are mind boggling to me.

So what is the best way to do what seems to me like a simple thing of triggering automations when a camera detects motion and recording it?