2 min read

Surveillance camera for my house - problem and requirements

Surveillance camera for my house - problem and requirements
Photo by Marra / Unsplash

The gas bottles that provide gas for the oven and hot water for our house reside in a shelter outside the building (for safety reasons). But as they are out in the open, in order to secure them we added a padlock to the door.

Two times that padlock has been broken and the bottles stolen already. We are fed up.

So, in order to catch the thief (or at least to create some sort of evidence in order to talk to this person and dissuade they to continue pursuing this path) we intend to set up cameras around the house to take photos when something suspicious is happening.

The system should be:

  • power efficient, as the house is running on solar and energy is a scarce resource,
  • require little bandwidth, as we don't have gigabit broadband but community broadband,
  • as little moving pieces as possible, so less parts that can fail,
  • affordable, as I don't have a lot of money to throw at this right now.

Different approaches could be explored, such as:

  • Setting up a Home Assistance instance, connect cameras to it and set up alarms
  • Using Frigate NVR or ZoneMinder to monitor the cameras and trigger alarms.

All of these approaches require to run a server. These solutions also adds a bunch of features that I think I don't need, and the server adds an additional part that can fail.

On top of this, you need to purchase cameras, power them, connect them to the server and the server to the internet, and so on.

I think that having the internet connection is enough to notify me of anything that could be happening, if the camera that is capturing the video feed is capable enough.

That is why the approach I am exploring is to use esp32 with the camera module.

Photo by nowforever / Wikimedia Commons / cc-by-sa

My requirements for this project are:

  • Motion detection,
  • Local storage of images,
  • Instant notification with an image that I can recognize,

A nice-to-have feature would be to add a speaker through which I could send audio messages to be played to the perpetrator so we can discourage them from continue pursuing the theft.

So, what I envision is to have a bunch of cameras connected to the internet through our house wifi router, and for the cameras to directly send messages over Telegram (for now) to a family group where we can take action. We could reply to the camera message with audios that could be played by the device itself.

Will keep writing about this rabbit hole later...