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Comment by neals | Hacker News Reader

I've been looking into home security lately and with the more expensive camera-kits (say $2k+)...

I've been wondering if a de-centralized raspberry-pi setup might be so much better. And with 8mp I think I should start a POC, right?

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There are a few projects out there [0][1] that make it fairly simple to set up a motion detection capable solution with a simple USB webcam. I'm currently waiting on a cheap infrared camera from China ($4!) for use with my Pi, but I've done testing with an older Logitech HD camera and have had excellent results.

[0] Motion: http://lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome

[1] MotionEye: https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneye

If you don't mind, could you please post a link to the $4 IR camera?

Indeed. (I have a project that needs to distinguish between cats in the dark. No kidding!)

A pet door?

Cat-specific food bowls :-)

I was researching this a few months ago, but gave up upon the cat facial recognition. The best I could find for the raspberry pi was opencv haar filters for humans, and that was just detecting if a face was present in the video frame. I'm curious, how are you planning on doing cat facial detection for this?

maybe he has a white cat and a black cat... but I would probably use RFID chips in their collar.

That's what I'm trying first. RFID range is an issue, however. The electronics for this is easy, the problem is that I suck at carpentry.

The cats in question are pretty different (one black, one orange), so discrimination in visible light is easy. Not sure about IR yet.

I picked one up on eBay [0] that is currently in transit to my apartment. Manual focus, somewhat garish looking and with probably crummy resolution, but I'm willing to try it for $4.

There are a large number of similar cameras on the market that ship from China/Hong Kong on eBay. YMMV, but if you've got a few bucks and are willing to wait, it may be worthwhile (depending on your use).

[0] http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-50M-6-LED-Night-Vision-Webcam-Ca...

Have you looked at https://zoneminder.com/ and the IP cameras it supports?

Definitely consider zoneminder. I've used it with Foscam and Crenova ip cameras with good results. The cameras I got were $30 for a basic dome and $70 for a pan-tilt.

However, if you do decide to go this route I would be prepared to put all of the cameras on a separate network without access to the internet or the rest of the lan. They are literally little linux machines that shouldn't be trusted. Setup a firewall that ensure they can only connect to the zoneminder server.

There's a lot of competition in this space. If you want to do DIY for kicks, then of course feel free to, but items like this are pretty tempting for those of us without much free time:

http://www.amazon.com/Guardzilla-GZ502B-Video-Security-Syste...

Siren, two way audio, camera, motion sensor, etc. I've been eyeballing this for some time. Might get it before I go on my next trip.

I've been looking at the same type of projects, but someone pointed out that 1080p @ 30fps is 1TB in 24hrs!

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