Budget hardware for CCTV and Home Assistant?

[Rob.]

I'm working on adding a few smart upgrades to my house, but am struggling a bit with finding suitable hardware to run it from among the hundreds of options. Can anyone help with suggestions based on my requirements below?

- I'd like to install a subscription-less doorbell camera along with a couple of CCTV cameras. I had a cheap Annke DVR in a previous house which was awful, so was thinking of using a PC/server/NAS with software (maybe
- I want try try Home Assistant to control the lighting in my new kitchen (WiFi at the moment, but may go for Zigbee), plus PiHole or similar to block ads via DNS.
- I don't have a huge amount of saved content for streaming, but it might be handy to store 2tb or so of backups
- I have power in the loft, so was planning to install up there
- I don't want to spend lots, maybe £200 (excluding the CCTV cameras)
- Currently only have WiFi, but may be able to run Cat6 from router to loft if it's vital
- Low power draw is preferable as it will obviously be on 24/7

I was intrigued by the N100 tiny PCs, but apparently these might struggle with the processing power caused by the CCTV element? I've seen Intel NUC suggested, but there are so many variants, I don't want to buy something unsuitable. Would really appreciate some suggestions from people who are in a similar situation!

Thanks.

[markiii]

cctv depends on resolution and how many cameras.

think hard about whether you want it all on one box, i deliverately keep my media server, pihole and cctv seperate even though they could be merged.

as major work on one box doesn't at least screw everything

[Condi]

Budget way would be to get a cheap NAS and run things off that. Even the cheapest Synology NAS will work happily as a DVR for a handful of cameras, and using a program called Docker you can install Pi-Hole. Should be possible for less than £200. Obviously as well as that it will run all the usual NAS things - media server, photo backups, document storage etc.

Ideally you'd want to go a few models up, which will get you redundancy (2 drives), much more RAM (2GB vs 500Mb) and a much faster CPU (2ghz vs 0.8ghz).

This will do what you want
https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products/DS120j

But this will do it a lot better
https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products/DS224+

Whether it is worth it depends on how many cameras you want, if you need duplicated HD's, and how much you intend to access the files on it. The increased RAM makes a big difference to the performance.

You will need network connections for them, but if you have power then it's very simple to use powerline adapters to enable that.

Edited by Condi on Sunday 18th February 21:49

[ARHarh]

Having messed about with self hosted NVR for a few years there is only one answer Frigate. https://frigate.video/ Bit of a learning curve but well worth the effort. You will need reasonable hardware but nothing excessive. I run it on a second hand HP T630 with a coral A+E key TPU and a 256gb ssd. This happily runs 9 cameras of which 6 are setup to detect objects. Depending on hardware you could easily run home assistant on the same machine, but as suggested I would keep the cameras on a separate machine as they do tend to use a lot of resources.

Alongside my frigate machine I run another HP T630 running Proxmox with Home assistant, pihole, openmediavault, unifi controller, Immich and Heindall dashboard.

[dundarach]

I bought a £40 pan and tile camera from Amazon two years ago, been outside since and still pans and tilts.

Although I have NAS etc. I set it up to simply email me 3 photos when it triggers to a gmail account.

You can connect live to it, or simply pop on to gmail to see a quick snapshot of the days events.

Also this way, if something happened, gmail would keep the stills, that's my thinking anyway.

So £40 all in forever.

[Condi]

ARHarh said:

Having messed about with self hosted NVR for a few years there is only one answer Frigate. https://frigate.video/ Bit of a learning curve but well worth the effort. You will need reasonable hardware but nothing excessive. I run it on a second hand HP T630 with a coral A+E key TPU and a 256gb ssd. This happily runs 9 cameras of which 6 are setup to detect objects. Depending on hardware you could easily run home assistant on the same machine, but as suggested I would keep the cameras on a separate machine as they do tend to use a lot of resources.

Alongside my frigate machine I run another HP T630 running Proxmox with Home assistant, pihole, openmediavault, unifi controller, Immich and Heindall dashboard.

Seems very complicated when you can buy systems which are designed to do a lot of what you're doing across multiple machines and multiple applications With a simple click of a button "enable movement recognition" or whatever it says, many cameras will do all the object recognition for you, meanwhile most NAS products have photo backup apps, media players, etc you can install.

The OP wanted budget (and by the sounds of things, simple), I would suggest that running 2 machines and a variety of programs to achieve what can be simply and cheaply done in different ways is neither budget friendly nor simple!

[ARHarh]

Condi said:

ARHarh said:

Having messed about with self hosted NVR for a few years there is only one answer Frigate. https://frigate.video/ Bit of a learning curve but well worth the effort. You will need reasonable hardware but nothing excessive. I run it on a second hand HP T630 with a coral A+E key TPU and a 256gb ssd. This happily runs 9 cameras of which 6 are setup to detect objects. Depending on hardware you could easily run home assistant on the same machine, but as suggested I would keep the cameras on a separate machine as they do tend to use a lot of resources.

Alongside my frigate machine I run another HP T630 running Proxmox with Home assistant, pihole, openmediavault, unifi controller, Immich and Heindall dashboard.

Seems very complicated when you can buy systems which are designed to do a lot of what you're doing across multiple machines and multiple applications With a simple click of a button "enable movement recognition" or whatever it says, many cameras will do all the object recognition for you, meanwhile most NAS products have photo backup apps, media players, etc you can install.

The OP wanted budget (and by the sounds of things, simple), I would suggest that running 2 machines and a variety of programs to achieve what can be simply and cheaply done in different ways is neither budget friendly nor simple!

My setup is budget that was the whole point of my post. Each PC cost about £50, the TPU cost £30. Each camera cost £20. So about £250 for a 6 camera setup. Mind I had to buy at good prices when the deals were there. But even buying at normal prices it could be done for no less than £100 more. I also monitor 3 bird box cameras with this, but they are not really part of the requirement the OP would want. So about the same price as an average NAS. Once you buy cameras with proper object detection, You are not going to come close to that functionality for that cost. Yes its not just a few clicks to set up, but if he is going to be setting up Home assistant it will be by far the most compatible.

[donkmeister]

OP, I think you are looking for something a bit more involved than the typical "Buy RING, pay up and forget about it" user so perhaps this might be interesting...

The centre of my home network is a TrueNAS Scale server. This is an enterprise-grade server OS built on Debian Linux, but crucially for home users is free. I'm using an Ryzen 5600 and 64GB of RAM, so a bit meatier than an N100 but TBH the CPU never goes over 20% utilisation in normal running. One of the reasons for using TrueNAS Scale is that it has a user-friendly Hypervisor, so I have HA running on one VM and Windows on another with BlueIris (this is a CCTV solution). There's a bit of a learning curve but if you can deal with Home Assistant you can deal with this, honest.

Alternatively, run ProxMox (which is an awesome baremetal hypervisor) with a VM for Windows/BlueIris and another for your HA OS.

For extra security, don't expose your CCTV cameras or whatever solution you go for (BI, Frigate, Zone Alarm) to the internet. In fact block them from internet access at the router. Run a Wireguard VPN host on your router (some would say "do it on your server" but I prefer to keep the VPN on the device I can't really mess up by accident) and have your phones as clients for when out and about.

[Griffith4ever]

Second the Synology NAS route. I have a DS220+

Its a NAS raid data store
Its running HomeAssistant in a Vurtual machine
Its running pihole in a docker (though i turned it off as it didnt seem to do much more than adblocker).

I don't run my cams through it as I have a dedicated Reolink NVR for them, but you can, and I do, patch the feeds through to HA. (One of my cams takes a photo and emails me it, via a security cam, triggered by a movement sensor in the mail cupboard, all through a HA script.

BTW - Zwave is infinitely more supported than Zigabee. I have a st tonne of devices on Zwave, and one on Zigabee.

Put the NAS somewhere not in earshot. HA will keep the discs ticking away full time writing real time logs.

Edited by Griffith4ever on Saturday 24th February 12:10

Edited by Griffith4ever on Saturday 24th February 12:10