shortwavesurfer

Get yourself a solar node and a 30 foot flagpole and put it up because height is might and you would be absolutely amazed the kind of things you can find with a high node acting as a relay. We have a node where I live that is 200 feet up on a tower and during band openings I can receive nodes from over 300 miles away in a lot of cases.

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.

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

• HA Green
• HA ZBT-1 (zigbee dongle)
• Reolink home hub (control wireless cams and recording storage)
• Reolink Argus 3E (camera)
• zigbee door/window sensors (of some sort)
• zigbee smoke alarm (future purchase)
• zigbee vibration sensor (washer/dryer running/stopped) (future purchase)

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.

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.

I don't see anything to indicate what it is. The sensors connect wirelessly to the panel that sits at the front door. But I see no branding on the sensors themselves unless maybe they're on the back and I need to remove them to check. The system was installed in like 2023. The panel itself has no visible branding except for the ADT logo and it is currently not connected to my Wi-Fi network but it does apparently connect to ADT through cellular over I think it's AT&T.

I am looking at the Reolink Argus 3E with the reolink hub to handle the recording files. From what I understand, you can integrate the hub directly into HA and then all the cameras with their sensors become available from HA through the hub. So if, for example, you wanted to turn on the floodlight on the camera, you would tell Home Assistant, which would tell the hub, which would tell the camera.

I am looking at the reolink battery cameras and the reolink hub would handle video recording. HA would be sending off notifications about motion detection and possibly used to live stream the video coming from the camera itself.

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?

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

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

This was the plot of a book called Worst Case Scenario. But instead of a small plane, it was a commercial airline, and instead of a house, it was a nuclear power plant. I very much enjoyed the book, and will leave a link below. Oh yeah, not to mention that it also takes place in Minnesota. Just outside the Twin Cities as a matter of fact.

https://lemmy.zip/post/24701100

We dont have many here, but shortfast is like 10x faster than LongFast and can handle many more connections.