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!
Nice! I’ve been wondering lately if there was an open-source solution for this
These comments are why privacy products will always be behind. Why open-source is full of dead projects. These people are just trying to make a living off making privacy-focused products. And all the comments are like “They’re a for-profit company? They had marketing material prepped to reply to people’s comments?!”.
The code is open-source, self-hostable, built using commodity hardware (raspi), and they’re just trying to make it sustainable by providing an optional paid service. This is not the enemy.
Agreed, however the number of positive comments from one-day old accounts is suspect for me.
This is a security product where trust is paramount, so I get a bit itchy about anything like that, but I could be overreacting.
I can’t speak to the account thing, I checked the guy you replied to and it seems like his is 3 months old, not yesterday.
I wanted to mention that we plan to get a third-party security audit by a reputable firm sometime this summer.
No good deed goes unpunished. The sense of self entitlement some people display is staggering. FOSS project? Well, you should have done x y or z.
Also, I gave you $3 via Ko-fi, so you need to provide customer support in perpetuity and come to my house and install it. And heaven forbid you try to recoup costs!
Projects don’t just die out - a lot of them are killed (one way or another). For example, I had a fully specced out FPGA design that would capture the signal from Wii GPU and do internal upscaled resolution (think: like what dolphin emulator does but with actual hardware) not just post process sharpening. Total cost under $100 and some know how.
The amount of flack I copped for it made me shut down the github and work on it for myself. Once it’s perfected, I may post about it again but I sure as shit am not compelled to deal with the fucking peanut gallery anymore.
Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free. What a blessed utopia that must be.
Yeah, free, open source is fun, but we should also just support companies that have good ethics and want to make enough money to earn a living and keep making good products that respect people.
Yeah supporting companies which makes privacy focused products, will create incentives for selling them to people which want them not just gaining additional profits from selling your data or showing you with ads
I want utopian space communism, but I’m not going to hold out for only that ideal when I can support alternatives that are better than the current system.
You do you, but I’m holding out for it… and only in fully automated, luxury, gay form.
I see this with open source hardware a lot.
People want free hardware. That doesn’t work. Give your money to companies like this.
I like what this project is trying to do, self hosted security cameras need to be more accessible to get people to stop using corporate spyware.
Great to see.
The ubiquiti bell is the best but it is american and overpriced. I want something that can record, two way talk and display a message. The parcel camera is a bonus. It also needs to be able to be silenced at set times.
How much does it cost?
And add F-Droid
Thanks for your interest!
We tried adding it on f-droid, but it seems like they have a backlog of projects to add. They haven’t gotten to test it out yet it seems.
This is why we now support Obtainium for people that do not wish to use Google Play. It can be hooked up to our mobile_client repository releases to pull the universal APK.
We do not charge anything for DIY. For our future offering, we have some information on the main page (secluso.com) of our site in section 4, along with what you would get.
Can I have the video pushed to a self hosted server (eg NAS or proxmox VM) and just have my android be a client of that server?
In theory, that should be possible. We haven’t tested it.
Why a pi zero I’ve seen something like this done with an esp32 and a pi pico pi zero seems like putting an nvidia 1080 in your nes emu machine
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
I’ve been looking for something like this. To be more accurate, I’ve been looking for something that works as a doorbell/intercom, that doesn’t rely on big tech in some way or other. But this seems like a promising start.
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I ended up going with Unifi (G4 Pro Doorbell) after my test-run with Reolink went… poorly. It’s technically still ‘big tech’ but all the parts are on my property and my control, and (at least for the doorbell, that’s all I’ve got so far) it works nearly-perfectly with HA (I can’t get custom screen messages to stick when assigned through HA).
Why did you opt for pro vs nonpro out of curiosity?
It’s been a bit but I do remember I wanted the bigger screen, the fingerprint and nfc readers are nice to integrate ‘eventually’, and I think it was only an extra like $75? Oh, and the secondary package cam, that was the main factor tbh.
I wanted to get the poe version + their chime, but I got vetoed since ‘we already have a mechanic chime’ and I don’t have PoE setup in the house. But my pitch for the pro model was successful and an easy sell.
The only thing worse than your partner vetoing you is when they’re right.
Thank you for the response, very informative!
Curious what went wrong with your Reolink run. That’s what I’ve got. Doesn’t require an app or account, and works with home assistant.
I bought a unit + 4tb surveillance drive, to replace a (what we thought was a) dying nest hardwired gen2 doorbell. I was excited - pulled it out of the box, ‘oh, it has an AC brick too! I can set it up and make sure it works before we install it’
Prepped the camera, prepped the nas to ingest the feed and drives, setup the non-proprietary stream (the acronym/letters escape me), all on the AC plug… And the feed, from the cam to the reolink app absolutely ground to a halt. I’m talking like, after 5 minutes of uptime, the feed was 60+ seconds behind. Absolutely wild. I restarted the app, phone, doorbell, no fix. I turned off the open-source (?) feed, going with only reolink’s proprietary stream. Better, but after 10 minutes it was still 30+ seconds behind. Reset the doorbell, set it up again, no change…
So either I got a defective/malfunctioning doorbell, a bad AC plug (but wouldn’t it just die if it was pulling too much power…?), the AC plug isn’t rated for anything more than very intital setup (I saw nothing about that in the instructions, and why would you do that…) or that is ‘working as intended’ which, why even bother if that is true.
B&H accepted both doorbell and drive, opened, no questions asked. Was very excited and it genuinely ruined my day. :(
Sorry to hear your bad experience. Was the acronym you were looking for ONVIF?
Yeah, that’s it!
Now hack ring cameras so existing installed cams can connect to your own hosted network.
The poster’s account is under 1 day old. There are multiple brand new accounts interacting with this post, too.
And one of them is replying with positive sentiment.
But the one calling it sus is also 5 days old, and making good points.
🤔
I guess its just us in here then, among these AI bots.
Why not just Thingino?
Thingino looks like a great option for changing firmware of IP cameras to be open-source, and is useful in local NVR-like setups! Our goal is to different: provide an end-to-end encrypted, easy-to-configure and easy-to-use WiFi camera.
Very cool!
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage NVR Network Video Recorder (generally for CCTV) PoE Power over Ethernet Unifi Ubiquiti WiFi hardware brand VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #312 for this comm, first seen 24th May 2026, 22:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I’ll wait.
How does it scale? Can I do 50 cameras?
Can I do 20 users with granular permissions?
We’ve only tested with a few cameras, and it’s able to support that well.
We have work in progress for users. We use OpenMLS for end-to-end encryption and it allows for creating groups. We’re using that to allow multiple apps/devices to receive encrypted videos from the camera. We have the core function implemented, but haven’t added UI support in the app for it yet.
