I’d imagine you’d have to do a fair bit of research to be comfortable spending $100USD on a tiny little flashlight 😆

Wow that’s cool, did you get a Hank Light?

I was wondering why it needs software updates, if you can post to twitter or something, but then I noticed the GPLv3 notice and followed it to the documentation for the software: https://github.com/ToyKeeper/anduril/blob/trunk/docs/anduril-manual.md

The latest release seems to have added some function if you click 7 times then hold the last click haha. So many options!

To be fair, that does sound like a good excuse! I want to put in a reolink doorbell camera but I’ve got to drum up the confidence to drill through the side of my house. Eaves aren’t very noticeable and I reckon I can do a good job of patching a hole, but drilling through the weatherboards next to the front door seems like I’ve got to get it right or it will be obvious forever 😆.

Are you just researching flashlights, or is there a world deeper than just buy a flash light and use it to see in the dark?

Given what I’ve found with the clarity on my cheap camera, I think a cheap one should cover it anyway. Like I said, I might just start with a Reolink doorbell camera (not too cheap 😅) and see what it covers. Just need to work out how to drill a hole through the wall and out the other side, getting it in the spot I want, and also having the inside look nice (some sort of face plate for the inside of the wall). The cladding is weatherboard so will also have to content with the funny angle 😆

Huh, so frigate has the configuration set up to record from the main stream and detect on the substream (at least I think it does).

But using the TP-Link app I see everything much clearer.

I will go back and play again as I just set it up with the example configuration and didn’t do much else. 4MP might be fine after all.

Yeah my camera isn’t amazing at night either, but I don’t need to to be. Usually if someone comes close to the door, they’ll be identifiable anyway as the motion sensor lights will come on.

Reading on the Starlight ones is interesting. The companies selling them talk about recording in 0.001 lumens, how they were designed by the US military, etc. Then the people on the ipcamtalk forum say they aren’t magic and to lower your expectations, they can do good still images but normally you’re capturing moving things and low light will always be blurry for moving things due to the low shutter speed needed to capture enough light.

I think PieFed has only recently got an API for apps to connect to, hence the surge.

The person (me) is about 5 or 6 metres away at a guess. I can clearly tell it’s me, which probably meets the criteria. From what I’ve read, they say a 20x20 pixel face for identifying someone you know, and 40x40 for someone you don’t in good light. But Frigate is getting face detection and I will want to play with that. I doubt it could do a good job at it at such a low resolution.

It seems I have to decide if I want good night vision (lower MP and bigger sensor for maximum light per pixel), or high resolution for a great image during the day but bad night vision. I’ve been reading a bit on ipcamtalk and people have multiple cameras to cover the scenarios, ending up with 10 or 15 cameras to cover everything. I am less worried about security (identifying strangers at night) and more interested in playing with the technology (send me a warning message when my mother in law is at the door), so I might end up with high resolution cameras that do poorly at night.

I’m actually thinking I might get one of the Reolink doorbell cameras next, and just see what that covers of the front. Just got to work out where I can drill the PoE through the wall.

I do want to have one that can identify if the wheelie bin is out and notify me if it’s not but it should be, but I didn’t know I wanted that until I read it as a possibility in the Frigate docs 😆

I think I got my wife to feed it through while I was in the roof. A lot harder when doing it by yourself.

It was just me, I think my wife was out that day. It definitely would have been easier with two people 😆

I don’t think you really need 8MP at all. Sensor size is more important.

Maybe that’s the issue. With the one I have, you’d have no chance of facial recognition, zooming in you can barely see the face off the person. The camera covers a reasonably large area so the person only makes up a small part of that area, hence why I thought 8MP seemed like a good plan.

If you are recording as well it takes up a lot of space.

I’m recording but have heaps of space. I have frigate set to only record motion, 7 days of retention has only been 30GB of storage and I’ve got a dog running around outside. It’s currently recording on my 2TB boot drive but I can move it to my 16TB one if I need the space.

Check out cameras with the Starlight sensors, they get a great image at night without changing to a night mode or using IR illumination.

Thanks, I’ll look for that!

I did a lot of searching a few years ago on the ipcamtalk forums when I was looking for one. Check them out when you plan to upgrade!

I will! Though a reddit thread came up with my search, talking about how batshit crazy the admin was and how he will dox you or harass you if he doesn’t like you… so I will just read as a lurker haha.

Maybe it’s just my house that’s different! I measured to the ceiling and the eaves are a decent chunk lower than the ceiling inside the house. Here’s an artists impression of how the eaves are laid out:

Basically the boards holding up the roof are resting on the top of the walls, and the eves are formed from these boards extending past the walls.

Another pic:

If you imagine an outer corner of the house, this is a birds eye view. The brown are the internal beams of the roof (that are against the sloped roof, coming down at an angle), that all converge in the corner, almost locking off any access into there from the ceiling cavity. I drilled my blue circle hole before working this out, otherwise I might have picked somewhere else 😅. In the end I taped the end of my CAT6 cable to a plastic tomato stake, made a much bigger hole in the eave than I was planning, and poked around until I managed to get through the small gap into the ceiling cavity. Then I climbed in the ceiling and pulled on the stake to thread it through. I climbed in the ceiling a lot, because I’d poke it through and then climb into the ceiling but couldn’t find the other end and then tried again and so on. I didn’t actually find the garden stake until some time into my attempts, it got easier after that but still quite hard to get an angle that would work, and it didn’t come out in the spot I was expecting based on the angle either.

Which camera did you get?

This one. I paid about $45 for it a few weeks back when it was on a bit of a special.

I think 5MP still won’t be enough but 8MP cameras all seem to cost close to $300.

I’ve installed PoE cameras in eaves four times now and the worst part is always lying down in the roof space trying the get the wire fed through the small hole you can’t really see due to the sharp angle of the roof at the edges.

I’ve installed PoE cameras in eaves four times now and the worst part is always lying down in the roof space trying the get the wire fed through the small hole you can’t really see due to the sharp angle of the roof at the edges.

Would it be easier to feed it in from outside, up through the hole, then just keep feeding the cable in until it gets into reaching distance in the ceiling? That was my original plan.

Not a bad idea. I guess it depends on how the ground is shaped around it, you don’t want chunks falling off when you clip it with the mower trying to mow the grass at the edge. But you tell me it won’t be that brittle so maybe it will be fine once cured 🙂

I think I haven’t mentioned I installed a security camera, frigate, and connected it up to Home Assistant. Haven’t got a coral yet, seems they are hard to come by right now, but I installed frigate on my server that’s an ex-gaming machine - it handles the load OK but my graphics card doesn’t seem to be supported so it’s using CPU detection. I’ll probably get a coral when I can to solve that.

One thing I learnt is just how bad of an idea it is to try to run a cable from the outer corner an eave. Turns out the inside of the eaves are not part of the ceiling cavity as I had assumed. I got it in the end but it was pretty hard work 😅

I put it up in my back yard. I actually want it out the front so it can tell me about people arriving, couriers dropping things off, and apparently if you get Frigate+ you can have it tell you if you forget to put your wheelie bin out! However, I installed this one in the back yard because I expected to struggle and didn’t want the neighbours to watch me spend all day trying to run one cable - which given how it turned out I think was a good call 😆

I also only got a cheap one to play with. It’s 4MP and does the job but I think I’d like a higher resolution one for the front so I can play with facial and number plate recognition. I also think I made the wrong call getting a 4mm instead of 2.8mm, as it doesn’t have as wide of a viewing range as I was expecting.

Ah haha I guess I didn’t see all the important bits 😅

It makes sense it would be harder to mix at the edges, hopefully it does the job anyway.

Interesting, I skimmed the video to see the important bits. Their one is in ground, and I notice towards the end of the video they are showing the chunks being quite brittle, which probably isn’t an issue when it’s in the ground. You mentioned it needs to be higher than the ground level so the door can open, do you have an edge to it or are you risking having the edges crumble?

Holy crap, I hadn’t considered that we have the technology to create articles on the fly based on search terms.

That could be a serious weapon of war - you get your site to the top through SEO, then show each user personalised propoganda. You show googlebot the genuine page but adjust the page based on what you know about the user.

Interesting, so you mix soil, cement, and water together to make a kind of extra firm dirt base? What’s the end consistency like, is it more like soil with bits of cement in it, or does it make a pretty solid, flat surface that’s more like concrete but without as much strength?

Kagi does seem to cut out a lot of blogspam. I think Google is incentivised to send people to these sites with adwords ads on them.

Haha in NZ you get a message from all sorts, king, prime minister, minister for seniors, local MP, amd for many places, the mayor of where you live.

The list is here on the page about applying under “Who the messages are from”. You do have to apply (normally a family member will apply on their behalf), the king doesn’t magically know where you live 100 years after you were born.

Temu Voldemort Peter Dutton

🤣

I read it as there were more senior/experienced officers there but they didn’t correct the junior officer.

Yes sorry I didn’t mean leaders weren’t present, but that they didn’t show leadership.

What is was trying to imply was that some officers shouldn’t be (armed) on the front line. Ex-military especially.

There’s an episode of The Rookie (or episodes or something, TBH I didn’t pay too close attention my wife was watching it) where someone joins the police from the military and the training officer (why is also ex-military) is explaining to another officer basically that you are trained that there are you and enemies and enemies will try to kill you so and so on, and to become a police officer they need to be mentally reprogrammed to understand that call outs aren’t to enemy combatants, they are to people who are fellow citizens who may have made bad choices but your job is to help them not kill them.

I can see that being a real issue for an ex military rookie joining the police.

I am not either - anymore 😆. I have been running Nextcloud for years, but this was the push I needed to bring everyone on my OneDrive plan onto Nextcloud instead.