this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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homeassistant
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
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I use reolinks and didn't have to sign up anywhere.
They are blocked from the internet and work perfectly fine
@RandomLegend
Just be aware that the battery powered Reolinks generally don’t support RTSP and rely on the app or a Reolink NVR.
https://reolink.com/lu/product/rln8-410/
Oh good to know - didn't know that as i only have three of the basic ones
Looks like reolink may be the way to go. My question to you is are you using the home storage device or are you using the wired cameras directly with Home Assistant? I'm thinking about using the battery powered cameras. And from what I understand, they require the hub. So it would be camera to hub to home assistant. Correct?
I am using the Reolink 5MP E1 Zoom
But as @Claude [email protected] said - the battery powered ones do NOT provide a RTSP stream, therefore can't be used without the Account.
I don't know if the hub can connect to HA and i also don't know if the Hub requres an account.
Sorry
The hub does not appear to require an account from everything I can tell, but I have also done limited research so far. Although according to the following post, the battery cameras will indeed work with Home Assistant with the hub as the bridge between them.
https://community.reolink.com/topic/13274/reolink-home-hub-supports-home-assistant. It also appears as though you can make the battery camera's live stream too home assistant, but that obviously it drains battery quite fast while doing so. So you do not want to do so. In most cases you'll want to use them in motion only detection mode. Are you able to stream the camera through the companion app on your smartphone with your wired cams?
What I'm looking to do is be able to live stream the camera from my smartphone when I'm not at home if I decide to. The vast majority of the time though, I would be using it in motion only mode so that I would receive a notification if there was motion and then could look at the camera.
Regarding your question: yes I can look at the feed through my app at any given time
I use the RTSP2web application in home assistant for better latency, as direct RTSP streaming from the cameras has a delay of around 5 seconds.
I then just plugged that web stream into a video card on one of my dashboards and made a little dropdown menu for a couple preset PTZ points to quickly change to
Hey, thanks so much. I am brand new to all of this, and so I really appreciate all the help. I've never even considered trying to do a smart home before because I want everything to be open source as much as I possibly can. Basically, everything I've ever seen is like Samsung this and Google that and cloud account this and Amazon account that and all that shit.
So far im thinking
I'm not sure if I'll need a motion sensor or not, because the cameras record when they detect motion, and so they might present a motion detection sensor to HA through the hub.
My goal here is to replace my ADT security system with something I don't have to pay a monthly fee for and yet will be able to get the same functionality out of. I'm thinking I might need some sort of Zigbee buttons for arming and disarming the alarm and setting up those Zigbee buttons for a panic mode as well. I saw a YouTube video where in order to arm the alarm the guy had to press a Zigbee button twice and then had to press the same Zigbee button twice again within ten seconds or it wouldn't do anything.
Edit: Something I ran across today that might also be cool is to put a light sensor inside the mailbox so that when the mailbox is opened, light will hit the sensor and trigger it. And so you can know that the mail has run.
Good setup idea!
I love Aqara for all the sensors stuff, their products work good for me and are a breeze to set up with my son-off ZigBee stick.
I do use a door sensor on my mailbox as its still quite dark in the morning where I live and when the postguy delivers there wouldn't be enough light for it to trigger lol
Just to throw on some additional ideas: instead of a HA green you can get something like a HP EliteDesk G3 or Lenovo M75Q Tiny and run HA on that. You then have enough performance headroom for Frigate as your camera recorder even with machine learning based detection etc.
And you'd still have enough performance left to run something like Music Assistant 2.0
So far the only thing I find that I don't particularly care for is that apparently you need the reolink app to set up the cameras for the first time. I wish there was an open source way of doing it, but I can at least get their app properly through the Aurora store in order to at least configure it. And I'm guessing that I will have to enable parental controls on my router and disable the hub from being able to access the internet. They may well be telling the truth about not using my data nefariously, but if I can just stop the hub from accessing the internet entirely, except during specific times where I manually check for software updates, then they can't do anything.
Here at least, our mail is absolutely never delivered in the morning. It's always mid to late afternoon. Although perhaps a door sensor might work better anyway, because sometimes if the mail person gets here really late, it might be dark, especially during winter, with the time change.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm looking at those now.
A guy I trust uses blink cameras, but apparently they have some sort of local storage module that might allow the video to be stored locally instead of requiring cloud crap. I'm doing some preliminary research now to see what I can find out about it.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D9HVYZR4
Edit: Oh, apparently you do require an Amazon account. I did not realize Blink was owned by Amazon. So reolink might still be the best choice
You can put SD cards into reolonks and store it on them aswell.
They host their own little local webui and offer can be fully integrated into HA
Looks like Blink is owned by Amazon, so you would require an Amazon account, which is, for me at least, a non-starter. I saw a video and he's like you can access the sync device without forwarding ports and I'm like how the hell is that working but if you have to have an Amazon account that would totally explain it