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Comment by gregoriol | Hacker News Reader

Old smartphones are good as security cameras: they have a nice camera and wi-fi of course, but also could be much better than traditional security cams as they also can have 3G/4G networking and a battery, in case power/internet is cut for example. They could also record or play sounds, like an alarm. I have an iPhone 4 and iPhone 5 doing that. However, it's not easy to find an app for such a use, I'm planning to open-source my custom one + setup.

However, BE CAREFUL, devices with batteries MAY BE DANGEROUS. I have had so many bulging/swollen batteries, even with devices just stored in a drawer. No incident or fires yet fortunately. So always keep an eye on them!

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Consider storing devices with lipo batteries in a lipo bag. And always keep a powder extinguisher ready.

might also be worth mentioning that devices with lipo batteries which live in a drawer will survive the longest if stored at 40% charge.

I agree with your use case and I am interested in your solution. So many functions to add like face recognition, record only on motion detection (what is threshold)--object size/distance, send alerts, attempt license plate scan, etc

I do agree!

CCTV processing is often done server-side (ZoneMinder, Sinobi, ...), but nowadays "old" devices could do some stuff too. Motion detection is maybe not that intensive, but is hard to pull off (a car passing in the street might change the light on the walls/ceiling, it should not trigger the alarm, dogs/cats, ...). On iOS, you could do face detection using some Apple provided CoreImage components.

A few things I have been missing in the current apps/software: simple way to turn on/off (I had to open/kill apps), use less bandwidth (by pushing to the server only when motion is detected for example, MJPEG stream was about 200Kb/s), play an alarm sound when motion is detected, being able to interact remotely with the device like saying something out loud (if kid came home, triggered the motion detection and forgot to turn off the camera), ...

I wouldn't go for license plates though: you should not point a security camera to the outside/street!

What's the best software to turn an old iPhone (or Android phone?) into a security camera?

The concept does seem good, they certainly have more capable hardware and cost less than a lot of network attached cameras.

Not an answer, but this seems like it would be a fun, and fairly painless side-project. I've never tried writing something for streaming video over a network so it seems like it would be a good learning experience.

There are a few apps on the App Store: iPCamera for example (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ipcamera-high-end-network-ca...), it provides an MJPEG stream that you can process with a camera monitoring software like ZoneMinder.

There are also a few open-source projects with this kind feature: StreamIt for example (https://github.com/twittemb/StreamIt), which also provides an MJPEG stream.

This would be the most basic stuff.

MJPEG is however not the most efficient (~200Kb/s networking). There are also some "video" streaming projects like https://github.com/shogo4405/HaishinKit.swift or https://github.com/wlanjie/lf.swift, which provide MP4/RTMP/HLS streams and could be processed with a camera monitoring software like Shinobi (https://shinobi.video).

I hope this helps!

https://alfred.camera/ has worked really well for me.

> Old smartphones are good as security cameras

They don't get updates and are not secure to be used as network connected security cameras.

I suspect that relative to the vast majority of IoT devices they're quite secure for a use case like that, at least iPhones.

iPhones are not that bad at security.

Anyways, always put any device behind a router/firewall (at least when on wi-fi).

Also, prefer an app that pushes (to a remote server, ...), instead of an app that opens ports.

And don't run other apps on the device.

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