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Comment by RoyTyrell | Hacker News Reader

That really sucks, but this is exactly why I refuse to buy any smart-home devices that I can't control directly and work with Home Assistant. I prefer bulbs and switches that I can also reflash.

I do have a few Wyze cameras because they're cheap and I needed something "now" for a vacation home hours away, but long-term I'd like something that works either with Synology or control myself and preferably that I could reflash - again without cloud connectivity requirements.

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I have Lutron Caseta switches. They can be controlled entirely locally. You can't reflash them, AFAIK, but they work with Home Assistant just fine, and it's all local (it doesn't need to talk to a web service)

FWIW Wyze makes an RTSP-enabled firmware that, while not as featureful, works well with Surveillance Station.

Yes, but overall the RTSP implementation is absolutely terrible. Wyze cameras are a novelty, but any permanent implementation should use something better.

This RTMP/RTSP/HLS docker container bridge is leagues better, and there's no firmware to mess with.

https://github.com/mrlt8/docker-wyze-bridge

Yes on "refuse to buy any smart-home devices that I can't control directly and work with Home Assistant" but I'll go a step further. Only buy Z-wave/Zigbee or devices that use a similar standard (ESP32 comes to mind, especially with HA's new-ish core integration with that).

Wifi devices are a mess and you are often still reliant on a cloud/app for setup.

+1 for HA.

I'm using some Tasmota firmware gear, ie outlets from Athom, just works, no cloud, all mine forever.

Any local camera recommendations?

I got quite fed up with existing solutions and bought a couple of ESP32 + camera to try to create my own.

I use a Reolink NVR and then I pull the feeds into Home Assistant for viewing. I ran ZoneMinder for years but you really have to make sure your hardware can support it and you are using the right disks. Moving all my cameras to their own dedicated hardware was the best decision I've made when it comes to cameras.

Maybe Ubiquiti's lineup would be something for you?

Don’t all Ubiquiti device phone home now? At the very least they require a controller to manage, and flashing openWRT on them is a pain.

Depends on what you mean by "all Ubiquiti devices". My Unifi APs, switches, and EdgeRouter don't need to phone home and the controller can be run (intermittently if desired) on your laptop or a VM. My parents have an all-Ubiquiti network and the only time they have a controller in their house is when I come visit and do an upgrade.

My network has an always-on Ubuntu VM hosting the controller, but it's not needed for normal operation here either. (It is needed for things like guest portal pages and some network stats tracking.)

I just tested my local admin login and it still works. (Now, can I guarantee that nothing has even called-home and told Ubiquiti about that? Of course not.)

Cameras are a different ballgame; Ubiquiti cameras are much more tied to their software and hardware (and thus I don't have any).

UniFi devices don’t need to phone home, but they do try to collect telemetry

https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042384093)

Didn't Ubiquiti recently start to push cloud management for all their devices? I don't use their products but I recall seeing a heated discussion on HN about this.

Unifi Protect requires a) their hardware, either a UNVR or a CloudKey Gen2+ or higher and b) their cloud to SSO into the mobile app. If you don't want the mobile app you can use it entirely locally, but you still have to use their hardware.

edit: I know this because I have a Unifi Protect system.

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