Hello –

I know this is not a 100% fit for this community and I apologise - but I don’t really know where to ask best. There’s some selfhosting involved, so maybe the smart crowd here has some recommendations.

Here goes:

I want to mount a camera at a quite remote location. I have Wifi there that I can use (I pay for it, but its usage is shared, I don’t monopolize it). I do not have power there. It’s outside, mild in winter, quite warm in summer. I will not get there for months at a time. I want the camera to be private, not open to the world. Ideally I’d like a solar powered wifi camera that can connect to my home via Wireguard (I have that bit going, multiple roaming notebooks and phones connect to home, terminated in an Opnsense router).

I do not need any specific smart features on the camera - PTZ would be nice, but not even fully required.

I can come up with a configuration that involves a Raspberry Pi routing an off the shelf camera via a Wireguard tunnel, or similar, but that doubles the power issues I need to solve. I am not opposed to DIY a solution, but there’s the challenge of getting it well packaged in a waterproof way.

Considering I can’t really touch the wifi setup (cheap commercial router), I don’t really see a way to have a private connection without having some sort of a VPN (I could do others than wireguard in a pinch).

If you’d like to help me chip away at one or the other bit of this problem, I’d be very grateful.

    • johnnychicago@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      14 hours ago

      I’d like this to not be on the public internet, as general hygiene, really. Putting a weak little camera out there where it can be easily caught by an ip/port scan and get hammered seems neither smart for the device itself nor for the network it’s in.

      • Brkdncr@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        7 hours ago

        I use a Reolink camera for this purpose. Its not self hosted but it’s solar capable and doesn’t need an inbound firewall rule.

    • NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.comEnglish
      1·
      22 hours ago

      Probably a direct link to the home network so the camera looks like it’s on the same network.

      I’ve thought of and tried this for my VR headset to my home in a similar manner. The VR headset will only stream from my gaming PC if it’s on the same network and so I’d hope to use a VPN to tunnel into my network when not at home to play remotely. I’ve not gotten this to work, but this sounds like a similar hope for OP with a camera.

    • 4am@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      22 hours ago

      It’s not always about hiding only payloads.

      Although if you are wireguarding to your home IP you’re still not really hiding the destination.