Hey everyone,

We’ve built an open-source, privacy-preserving alternative to Ring cameras using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W (called Secluso). It uses end-to-end encryption to send videos from the camera to a mobile app, which is available both in Google Play Store and Apple App Store. We also support Obtainium for people that do not wish to use Google Play.

We’ve put in a lot of effort to make it easy to set up! You can set up our camera on your own Pi in less than 5 minutes with minimal technical expertise using our easy-to-use GUI deploy tool. Here are our setup guide and open source release.

The image shows a Pi in an official Raspberry Pi enclosure that you can use for your camera. We’ve also been working on a HAT for the Pi to add night vision, audio, temperature monitoring for safety, all in a compact form factor. You can see the HAT and an enclosure for the whole camera in the photo.

We’ve been working on this for almost 2 years now, and we look forward to we look forward to seeing what you all think!

  • jkaczman@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
    3·
    2 hours ago

    We like the Pi because:

    • It has a hardware-accelerated H.264 encoder (Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU). This allows video encoding to be off-loaded off the CPU.
    • The extra compute allows us to do be able to do higher frame-rates and video quality than an ESP32 is capable of
    • We made our motion detection for events more accurate through offering the option of human/pet/vehicle detection, which I don’t think ESP32 would be capable of (at least not in terms of the level of accuracy we currently achieve).
    • I haven’t researched this, but I’m not sure if an ESP32 could handle the end-to-end encryption computation, unless it has a co-processor for it