If you’re as big a smart home fan as I am, you’ve probably come across gadgets that left a sour taste in your mouth. Take Belkin’s Wemo line for example. Despite the fantastic smart devices in this series, Belkin’s decision to discontinue the family of products made them useless for people without dedicated Home Assistant or HomeKit setups.
Me? I specifically avoid Ring cameras at all costs, as the only thing worse than manufacturers randomly removing products is them intruding on my privacy. Fortunately, it’s fairly easy to replicate the surveillance functionality of Ring’s privacy-intrusive offerings with inexpensive single-board computers and regular RTSP security cameras.
Privacy-intrusive “features” built into Ring cameras are a major deal breaker
I prefer that my surveillance camera does not spy on me
Between outdated firmware, weakly encrypted credentials, and lack of encryption, smart devices are already notorious for their insecure nature. But then there are Ring surveillance cameras, which have been criticized for their privacy-intrusive nature. In 2023, the company was charged by the FTC for its lackluster privacy and security tools, which allowed hackers (and even employees) to digitally enter people’s homes and spy on them through Ring cameras. Or you can look at the most recent example, where the Super Bowl ad featuring Ring’s AI-powered Search Party “installation” got a lot of backlash from the community for spying on entire neighborhoods.
Call me paranoid if you must, but I don’t want big corporations tracking my personal information. Heck, that’s why I moved away from typical cloud apps and switched to self-hosted apps running on my home server nodes. For a security camera that can see my surroundings, the fact that a company can access my surveillance footage is a big deal breaker for me. Even if the easy-access nature of cloud-based productivity tools outweighs the superior privacy of a fully self-hosted setup for the less technically inclined, I don’t think it’s necessary to explain why cloud platforms that store images of my environment 24/7 are a bad idea. Fortunately, there are tons of cool tools that can provide the same functionality as Ring cameras while leaving me in charge of all the data generated by my security setup.
I prefer to buy a cheap security camera kit and manage it from my home laboratory
Frigate is my favorite tool for the job.
When it comes to self-hosting a network video recorder, there are plenty of interesting platforms to choose from. However, Frigate is by far my favorite of the bunch, combining a clean user interface with a lightweight design and powerful security features. It is capable of detecting faces and objects in real time, and with the right combination of masks, filters and zones, it is possible to track any strange (or rather, unintentional) activity without overloading the underlying system.
The best part? Frigate works extremely well with weak systems, and I’m not just talking about old mini PCs and refurbished thin clients. I have used it with him Raspberry Pi 5and while dedicated GPUs are better for motion tracking and accurate object detection, Frigate performs surprisingly well on this ARM-based single-board computer. I have some Tapo surveillance cameras that I connected to Frigate via RTSP streams, but this powerful NVR utility also works with makeshift security cameras. For reference, I’ve thrown everything from live streaming cameras and ESP32-CAM modules to old webcams and rear cameras built into old phones into my Raspberry Pi-powered server, and it hasn’t disappointed. Then there’s the plethora of AI accelerators that Frigate supports out of the box…
With the right AI HAT, my Raspberry Pi Frigate server can run object detection tasks
Combine all that with Home Assistant and you’ve got a powerful surveillance setup
On its own, my Raspberry Pi-powered NVR can extract streams from some cameras, but object detection tasks can stress its CPU. Fortunately, Frigate not only supports GPU frameworks for object detection, but can also take advantage of small AI accelerators, including the official one. Raspberry Pi AI Kit HATS. I bought one of these a long time ago, but ended up forgetting about it until a few weeks ago, when I decided to try it out with a Raspberry Pi-powered Frigate platform. It turns out that the Hailo-8L accelerator in the HAT works quite well with Frigate, although I still had to adjust the mask and zone values to avoid overloading the AI module with multiple camera streams.
Then there’s the Home Assistant aspect, which dials this DIY NVR’s usefulness up to 11. You see, Frigate has a spectacular plan designed by the community in Home Assistant, which allows me to access this NVR tool from the control center of my smart home. Combine Frigate’s excellent object detection prowess with the trigger action automation chains in Home Assistant and my Raspberry Pi surveillance system offers more value than a Ring camera. And he does it while respecting my privacy.
- UPC
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Arm Cortex-A76 (quad core, 2.4 GHz)
- Memory
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Up to 8GB LPDDR4X SDRAM
- Operating system
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Raspberry Pi operating system (official)
- Ports
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2× USB 3.0, 2× USB 2.0, Ethernet, 2× micro HDMI, 2× 4-lane MIPI transceivers, PCIe Gen 2.0 interface, USB-C, 40-pin GPIO connector
- GPU
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VideoCore VII
- Starting price
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$60
