Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

A while back, I had the need to remotely monitor a house while it was under renovation. A few friends of mine recommended a particular brand of highly-advertised security system. It was not cheap. As I was setting it up, I found out that most of the features that I wanted required broadband internet. This was not disclosed in ANY of the marketing materials. This house didn't have Internet and I wasn't going to purchase it because it would have been $60 minimum on top of the $40 or so the security system was going to cost.

What I did instead: I bought a Raspberry Pi camera, hooked it up to a RPi Zero 2W that I already had, bought an LTE hotspot and a $5/mo prepaid SIM from T-Mobile. On the software side, I used imgcomp (https://github.com/Matthias-Wandel/imgcomp) to take a photo every second and save it to a RAM disk. If the two pictures differed (modulo noise), the Pi would upload the changed picture to a directory on my VPS, which would then trigger a notification to my phone via Gotify containing the link to the picture.

It was all very Rube Goldbergian but it worked quite flawlessly for a couple of years.

I'm having trouble squaring "the security system was not cheap" with "the $40 the system was going to cost". How cheap were you looking for a security system to be?

I assume that this was a monthly subscription cost, not an acquisition cost, in which case it is indeed not cheap for most people.

Yes, I inadvertently omitted "monthly." $~100 would have been the minimum monthly cost.

The one-time purchase price of all the hardware was north of $200 with all the sensors and things.

Very cool! This is, IMO, perfectly in the spirit of all tinkerers and hackers, building their own solutions when they need from what they have. There is nothing Rube Goldbergian about this. My 2c.

Is not all tech basically rube goldbergy XD

Were you expecting to monitor the cameras over the Internet without an Internet connection? This reads like you were expecting the cameras to have built in LTE without some kind of subscription.

Yeah, this post is bizarre. Between "I bought an expensive $40 security system" and "it needed the internet, so I got rid of it and built my own, which also required the internet", I don't know what to think.

The post said that the commercial security system required "broadband Internet", which had a much higher monthly cost than the existing lower-speed Internet connection.

According to the post, the commercial system demanded a $100 monthly cost for the security services and broadband Internet, vs. $5 monthly cost for a lower-speed Internet access that was enough for the custom solution.

Therefore the reduction in the monthly expenses was worthwhile.

Was it monthly? I took it to mean a $40 one-off. Also, they don't say it requires broadband, for all we know LTE was fine for it...

That's pretty nifty. Now a days I'd say you could probably then run it through codeproject.ai's GPU or TPU based coral module after.

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