Show HN: CheapSecurity – Lightweight, Self-Hosted CCTV for Linux SBCs

My question about this project and the numerous similar projects: where do I get a usb camera suitable for this? Webcams typically have unsuitable enclosures, focus behavior, and low light performance.

What are the difference with systems like Motion (https://motion-project.github.io/4.0/motion_guide.html) ?

What is the difference between this and Frigate? Before clicking the link, I thought this would be a hardware solution (build you own camera from open components).

How does this handle motion detection? Anyone tried it?

I have a bunch of Nest cameras and some cheaper Tapo cameras.

The "motion detection" is night and day different. The Tapo does some basic frame-diffing and it's awful. Shadows? DING DING DiNG MOTION DETECTED! gust of wind made some blades of grass move? Motion! Spider? Motion motion motion! Turn down the sensitivity a notch or two and it won't notice a human walk across the frame 2 meters away. The Tapo ones claim to be smart but twigs and leaves still trigger pet/person/motion alerts. It makes them essentially useless.

The Nest cameras are so much better and their "human" detected is usually zero-false-negatives at the cost of one or two false-positives perhaps once every 3 or 4 months, and their app is superior (tapo one frequently needs to be false-killed to load clips). Yes I am aware that the nest ones are streaming back to google 24/7.

Tldr: naive frame-diffing sucks for this sort of thing if used outside. An open source implementation that has accurate and reliable "human detection" would be amazing. Doesn't need to be "AI" - I would hope that there is some sort of computationally reasonable OpenCV way of doing person detection. Perhaps wait for frame-diffing to flag motion then feed it to a more expensive algorithm?

`motion` is in the big hall of fame for 'software other things are based on' next to imagemagick and curl.

Anyone have camera suggestions? I've got 2 spare raspi 5s that would probably be a good base.

I always wonder why author of such software will not add some screenshot or gif showing UI and how it does work? In features there is mention of web interface.

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