TrenchcoatFullofBats

I will definitely add you to the list. And yeah, an older family member living far away who fell is the reason we started this project. We wanted to be able keep an eye on her (and allow other family members to do the same), but there wasn't anything available that met our requirements, either price or privacy-wise, so we built something and preconfigured it, including a Lubuntu VM with a Mesh Central agent installed that we could use for remote access and troubleshooting for the entire system. This has been super useful, and is the basis of our support model.

If a support package is purchased, we'll ship the device with a support VM installed that is shut down at all times EXCEPT when a specific (included) USB key is inserted into a specific USB port (the only USB-C port, located on the front of the device). This starts the support VM, at which point we would be able to remote in to check the system and fix any issues. The VM shuts down again when the USB key is removed, or after a set period of time, like an hour. This will allow us to ship the device and/or cameras to an older or non-tech savvy person and WE can provide them with support so YOU don't have to.

Will do! And thanks, that means a lot!

Done! Thanks for the interest!

Good question! starlight/night color cameras generally just have larger CMOS sensors to capture more light, OR they integrate an LED "spotlight" into the camera housing to increase the amount of light available to the sensor, and if that's not enough, the IR will kick in. Sometimes the sensor IS actually larger, and sometimes it isn't.

We've standardized on Amcrest cameras, and while we haven't actually tested it, Amcrest does have a "night color" outdoor turret camera that appears to support both ONVIF and RTSP, for the same price as the "regular" turret camera. The model number is IP5M-T1277EW-AI.

If it's like other similar Amcrest cameras, you can likely disable the AI stuff via the built-in configuration, especially if you have Frigate doing that for you.

Personally, I prefer a solution that uses a regular IP camera and a separate smart light (or regular light on a smart plug) that kicks on when motion or a tagged object is detected, which will then cause the camera to switch from black and white IR to color, usually in about a second. The separate light will give you a much better image than anything you'll get from a built-in LED or slightly larger sensor, in my opinion.

Home Assistant and Frigate make it easy to set up this kind of automation, and the "regular" Amcrest cameras have pretty good IR, so Frigate has no problem running detection on those feeds. The automation is basically "if a cat is detected on the garage camera, turn on the garage lights for x minutes".

Hope that helps!

We are not quite ready to roll everything out yet -it'll probably be another 2 or 3 months, but I'd be happy to shoot you a message when we go live if you'd like.

Thanks! Since our entire software stack is open source, and since open source software has been so transformative for our lives in general, it's a priority for us to give back where we can.

The profit will come from labor involved in assembling the hardware, pre-configuring the software for each customer, and providing personalized support via a set of subscription support plans at various prices, including individual one-offs.

We'll be dedicating a set amount of time every day to read support forums for the software we use (and places like Lemmy) and provide help where we can.

The comments here are interesting, as I'm helping with a project developing the software stack for mini servers we hope to sell that are preconfigured with Home Assistant (home automation) and Frigate NVR (camera control and recording) with local storage, local control, and no cloud component.

The hardware we're using for prototyping are off-lease Dell 7050 Micros running Proxmox, with 500gb Crucial MX500 ssds and an NVME Coral TPU that Frigate uses for object detection, which reduces CPU usage. 500gb is enough, because Frigate can be set to auto delete recorded clips after a set period of time, and clips can easily be saved.

Frigate can be installed via docker or as an add-on to Home Assistant. If you want to use Home Assistant, you can install Home Assistant OS directly on the SSD via these instructions.

We're using Amcrest WiFi cameras (IP4M-1041B) that connect to an on-board WiFi network controlled by an OpenWRT VM that uses the WiFi card in the system (not the ones that come with the Dells). Everything on our systems is locked down by an Opnsense firewall vm, so it should be safe to use even in an existing unsecured network.

Personally, for my own system, I've been running 4 Amcrest ethernet turret cameras (IP5M-T1179EW) for about 4 years now with no problems. You just need a cheap PoE switch (mine was $20) and then run some cables.

To use Frigate, the cameras must support both ONVIF and RTSP. Pro tip: the Amcrest Smart Home line of cameras won't work - you need a camera with a built-in web server for direct configuration.

For remote access, you could set up Wireguard (via an official Home Assistant add-on), or you could pay Nabu Casa (Home Assistant's parent company) $65/year (or 75 EUR), enter your credentials in the Home Assistant app and you're good to go, while helping fund future Home Assistant development.

Same, but my company had apartments they owned in multiple cities for this purpose that employees could also use for vacations if you had enough seniority (and no one else was scheduled to use it for business). The London apartment was pretty nice but the New York office was a freaking penthouse. Crazy.

No, it was definitely him. I was just paying tribute to him as an aficionado of a democratizing system of long range communication.

The GNU thing is a reference to author Terry Pratchett, who wrote about a democratizing system of long range communication similar to the telegraph but with semaphore towers, called the "clacks" (because of the clacking sounds the semaphore flags made when they moved). Each clacks tower was in visual range of another clacks tower, and each one was manned by an operator who would read the incoming message and then send the same message on to the next tower in the line until the message reached the intended destination. This system is one of the main subplots in the book "Going Postal", which is a critique of unchecked capitalism, corporate greed and privatization of profit over public service and worker safety.

In the book, the clacks system is the victim of a hostile takeover by a rich capitalist named Reacher Gilt, who either directly via one of his agents (similar to the Pinkertons), or indirectly via cost-cutting that leads to safety issues, murders/kills the creator and previous owner of the clacks system, John Dearheart.

After his death, clacks operators up and down the line of towers memorialize him with the message "GNU John Dearheart", which was inserted into the "overhead" of the messages (also literally over their heads in the towers), which were sent in every single clacks message on all lines as additional information for operators about the message.

"G" meant "send the message on" "N" meant "do not log the message" "U" meant "at the end of the line, turn the message around"

In the book, the reason they did this is because "A man’s not dead while his name is still spoken".

When Pratchett himself died, GNU Terry Pratchett became a thing as a way for fans to remember him. Some even created the "X-Clacks-Overhead" code, which can be inserted into the header of websites as a tribute to those who should not be forgotten.

So GNU Terry Pratchett and GNU Garry Shandling.

GNU Garry Shandling

Fun fact: Kelsey Grammar (Frasier) is a proud Trump supporter and Christian who also publicly supported Roseanne Barr after she was fired from her show's reboot for tweeting that one of Obama's advisers was what happened when the "Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby".

If you run Home Assistant, Sleep as Android can publish events to an MQTT broker so you can create automations based on those events, like "smart_period", "awake", "not_awake", "alarm_alert_smart", etc.