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Comment by varenc | Hacker News Reader

I self host my "baby monitor" with UniFi Protect on UCG-Max and a G6 Instant wireless camera. It's more work to setup, but pretty easy for a techie. It has the "turn on the app anywhere and it works" feature, and with a 2TB SSD I get a month+ of video storage. Because storage is local, it doesn't need to compress the video and I get a super clear 4K image. And I use Homebridge to expose the camera over Apple HomeKit which is a convenient and a more user friendly way to access it. And HomeKit also gives you out-of-home access with a hub. I love my setup, but I couldn't in good conscience recommend it to a non-techie friend, especially if they're sleep deprived from their infant.

But I do miss the lack of any baby-specific features like sleep tracking. It has support for crying detection, but that's it.

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This is indeed far more of a "HN Style" comment.

It calls back the classic, "you can already build such a system quite trivially": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Hah never thought I'd be compared to that legendary comment! It hits home for me because I worked at Dropbox for years. I did at least qualify that I couldn't in good conscience recommend my setup to non-techies :)

If you don't want a baby camera system that's also a part-time hobby...Nanit does seem like the best option. I just lament that the best option requires giving up so much.

Don't worry, I also use Ubiquiti, and self-host Home Assistant on my TrueNAS :)

I have a little server rack cobbled together out of wood under my basement stairs, with a UDM Pro, 24 port POE switch, and an ancient Dell 2U poweredge for TrueNAS.

You really can trivially do UniFi protect. Barely even have to know networking. I have it along with vtech monitors, works flawlessly.

Not enough “anyone can set it up trivially“.

He missed the opportunity to mention the reverse proxy, firewall with geo blocking, VPS and WireGuard, Grafana and Loki setup.

You joke but wireguard and, very easily, tailscale, solves most crap you normally need to fix. Close everything with ufw and put tailscale, and then you trivially have access from any device / desktop.

"and you trivially have access from any device / desktop"

My definition of "trivial" seems to be different.

Ah yes, provided it has a web interface, but I kind of assumed that. I just go to http://house-porch/ etc and get streaming vid/sound.

I just rely on UniFi and HomeKit for out of home access! But you're so right I could also access remotely via my Wireguard server or Tailscale running on my ubiquiti console... Wish I could hook up baby events like "poop diaper" to Grafana.

Regarding out-of-home access, I'll drop a note about connecting your phone to your home network with a VPN. Now you're always connecting the same way for this and everything else.

It's not perfect because wifi networks might block the VPN, but for the one wifi network I use the most, Wireguard on port 53 works splendidly, for now.

Ok that’s really cool; I didn’t know you could set up Apple’s smart home thingy to forward a live feed to the cloud.

It's pretty cool! But homebridge is another service to run in a Docker container.. so even less user friendly. But it's definitely the primary way everyone that's not me accesses the baby camera. The out-of-home access requires a "HomeKit Hub" which can just be an Apple TV that's always plugged in. And HomeKit also has "HomeKit Secure Video" feature which is cloud based video storage, but with E2EE. But don't recommend their video storage really.

I have a bunch of cameras from various vendors, some with open FW, some with their original FW, all cut off from the internet. They used to be connected to Frigate but due to performance issues I offloaded the work to Scrypted on a RPi and an AppleTV and the setup works great. It was easy to set up and it's easier to use than any other app, assuming you are into the Apple Home ecosystem.

It's not really self hosted since it relies on Apple but it's the least evil at this point. Giving unencrypted video and audio to some company (if what OP says is right) would be way beyond my risk tolerance point.

I have a smarthome setup I built myself using Lua and a Raspberry Pi. Anything it can do locally can be securely exposed on the internet via a service like netbird , which I use for free and is literally a command to get running, or tail-scale which I believe is harder to use. I don’t have video but I think that would work in that scenario as well.

I used to use the docker + homebridge route but it became tedious to maintain. Instead, I connected it via the Google Home integration (requires an Insights plan) and then use my existing Starling Home hub to access it via HomeKit. This seems to be more reliable and less work than before.

Alternatively you can setup a vpn with rules that automatically enable vpn when you try to connect to specific addresses. Works with Tailscale and on-demand VPN for me. This will work with any IP webcam.

I unfortunately did spring for a Nanit, but am keen to stop paying the subscription... any pointers of a resource you'd encourage me to look at to try to the same thing you did?

Definitely! For self-hosted as a product I think Ubiquiti's Unifi Protect is easiest. (but there's free software options like Frigate)

You just need a console (NVR) and the a camera. Here's what I use:

- https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cloud-gateways-compact/c...

- and a wireless camera: https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/uvc-g6-ins

and the camera has a standard 1/4" female thread mount, so also a stand to hold the camera. And in the UniFi protect setting enable "Hallway Mode" to rotate it 90 degrees to get the length of baby.

Thank you so much!

Let me know how it goes! other thoughts:

- For a Unifi Protect console (basically an NVR), there's lots of other options too. The one I linked I also use as my Network controller and wifi gateway. I assume it's possible to just use it as a Protect server/NVR (but I also recommend Unifi Wifi)

- The G6 camera, since its meant for normal security uses, is wide by default. But I like it flipped 90 degrees for baby monitoring. Just find the advanced setting that lets you enabled "Hallway Mode" and it flips it 90 degrees so you a tall skinny screen

- Also, to save money, you can get an UCG-Max (linked above) without an SSD, then just install your own nvme SSD. Can get a semi-cheap one since you don't really need super high write and read speeds. But decent endurance would be good.

- I also use the 'privacy area' feature to black out areas in my camera that aren't baby. That way I make sure I'm not recording anything else, and it makes the video storage more efficient.

- You can run Tailscale on the UCG-Max which is another way to enable out-of-home access if you don't want to enable Ubiquiti's cloud services: https://github.com/SierraSoftworks/tailscale-udm

You've still had to buy a proprietary system, it just happens to run locally? Not really much better is it.

Sure, not perfect, but quite a bit better. Getting from A to Z involves a few letters inbetween...

I came here to say, this is exactly what I do also.

Unifi accidentally made a fantastic baby monitor.

The recent APIs they’ve built makes me hopeful that I could run an AI model against the footage eventually and build those Ai features for myself.

I've been exploring this! Have tried Frigate and SCrypted. With their API it's easy to connect the camera to anything. Haven't got any useful AI models running. What I'd love is sleep tracking.

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