Motion Sensors and Home Security Gadgets Without Cameras
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https://www.thesmartesthouse.com/collections/best-z-wave-sen...
Or just more basic human presence sensors
https://sonoff.tech/products/sonoff-zigbee-human-presence-se...
If one doesn't want to invest in Z-Wave I'd say grab some of the Aqara FP1/FP2 sensors. The FP2 gives you full room zone presence detection, so you can put it in your kitchen/dining room and set up predefined areas and it'll expose those as their own presence zones.
If you don't need that level of granularity, the generic Tuya mmWave sensors on Amazon, or elsewhere, are a solid option. Super discrete, plenty of tuning parameters, and good smart home platform integration. I prefer the ZigBee ones because the WiFi ones can be a little noisy on your LAN (traffic not interference).
I hate to even recommend EST because they're always hard to get based on lack of availability. But, you can't go wrong with those two sensors.
And, yes, most of the options listed in the article are garbage unless you're looking for one off options.
I'm not a fan of the Aqara gear as they've had some funky limitations on the software side and I've not had good results even compared to the Apollo [2] gear.
[0] https://shop.everythingsmart.io/products/everything-presence... [1] https://shop.everythingsmart.io/products/everything-presence... [2] https://apolloautomation.com/collections/sensors
I’m migrating from my zigbee stuff bridged through home assistant to HomeKit. Now I have thread to HomeKit directly
[1] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/myggspray-wireless-motion-senso...
This doesn't sound that useful without a camera unless you're using it in an indoor space where you know animals aren't going to trip it. Otherwise, what do you do when you get an alert at 3am and you don't know if it's a racoon or a burglar?
Something that has driven me rather crazy is that I cannot see my doorstep. I cannot really see it from the front window; I definitely can't see it from the peephole in the front door; I definitely can't see it if I'm not home. The only way to see if an object is sitting at my door, is if I go and open the door.
So that set up a quandary for me, as receiving package deliveries, or groceries or whatever, can be troublesome, because those delivery services just aren't into notifying someone that delivery is complete (the further away they are, the noisier the notifications!)
It would've been great to monitor my doorstep remotely, and know if someone put something there. So I looked into Ring and into Nest/Google Home. They literally have nothing except the cameras. A compatible, under-mat sensor is simply not a thing for consumers (was discontinued at best.) For some reason, we consumers are not allowed to have a weight-sensing mat for outdoor use.
Since I live in high-density housing, a motion-sensing camera would be stupid. It'd be triggering dozens of time every day. Also looking directly into the pool area, and I'm not excited to "surveil" my neighbors: I just wanna know about deliveries!
I think the best I can do is some sort of "corner mirror" mounted near my front window. That won't permit remote monitoring, though.
What drew me to them is that they have RTSP (and ONVIF for their PTZ models) built in, so you're not beholden to their app. I use them paired with Frigate, but they also all include an SD card slot for local recording.
They have on-camera detection for people, pets, cars, etc. No obligation to use their cloud services (I have them on an IoT VLAN with internet access disabled, and have never had an issue). If you're not using your own NVR then you'll probably have to keep them internet accessible for remote viewing.
Cameras have been in the Texas elements for a few years now and the streams look like they did brand new. I'd say my only complaint about them is that the mounts are oddly designed, but perfectly usable as is. 3D printing largely makes that a non-issue, though.
Frigate for video recording, even if you use none of the GPU based object detection features it does a fine job of recording and live view from a browser.
The machine running frigate may need to be some kind of private VPN client for remote access depending on how your ISP is setup.
Frigate will really work with a huge selection of random h264 rtsp stream cameras. You can use a mix of high end high quality expensive cameras and cheap ones to monitor less important spots.
Reolink doorbell camera will work natively in frigate with bidirectional audio via html5/webrtc in a browser to listen and talk to people.
I've never been able to get their general security cameras to work reliably. Between poor uptime, frequent need for power cycling, and inconsistent stream quality, I'd choose something else unless you already own them or their particular form factors suit your needs.
If anyone goes this route save yourself a ton of trouble and ignore 95% of the articles and forum posts telling you to use Scrypted and HomeBridge. It is trash and won’t work well.
The best way to link the NVR to the Internet and other smart devices is with HomeAssistant. Everything else is trash.
It actually works, and HomeAssistant exposed motion detection alerts as their own sensors. The vehicle alerts, people alerts, animal alerts, and more generic motion alerts all pipe in as if they are their own device. You can easily combine this with some super cheap smart light switches and a speaker or two to make your own alarm system. The NVR has EXCELLENT person, animal, and vehicle detection and differentiation. Very few false positives, and I have never seen them miss something even under the worst conditions. We had a thunderstorm last night and they picked up vehicles on the road through heavy rain and flashes of lightning.
Do not bother connecting the Reolink mobile app to the the Internet. It is perfectly serviceable for when you are on the same network, it’s just anywhere else. Just pipe video out with HomeAssistant.
- install FW.
- extra: install open source NVR like frigade and connect these cameras, preferably over ethernet not wifi.
- extra extra: have a separate VLAN for these cameras.
Now you have a secure isolated system. If you want a remote viewer, you can have a vpn tunnel to your nvr to access it from anywhere in the world.
It’s not a perfect system but way more secure than anything consumer out there
Having the data pins connected would also enable lots of other nifty use-cases.
Also, have they managed to forward port the drivers to a recent mainline kernel in the meantime, or are they still on ancient vendor SDK kernel versions?