Actually good IoT - Internet of things but not shit

[Dante Alighieri]

I'm looking for a smart doorbell that doesn't require a subscription and can be secured. Anybody know of anything?

I'm looking at the Ezviz DB1C Wi-Fi Video Doorbell right now but I wanted to get some other opinions.

 

[CreamyHerman’s]

There is no good IoT, just build a wired CCTV infrastructure

 

[AmpleApricots]

The one you build yourself. You don't know what's running on anything else and even if you know, the manufacturer will never update it and exploits will eventually crop up. A lot of these things run ancient linux kernels with very known exploits.

 

[Drkinferno72]

Mechanical locks and if the printer makes a strange sound, shoot it

 

[𝕺𝖑' 𝕯𝖎𝖗𝖙𝖞 𝕱𝖆𝖙𝖘𝖔]

Iot is a terrible fucking idea in general. It's bad enough to live through a power outage when you're living somewhere with an electric instead of gas stove, now imagine your fucking locks and toaster and shit don't work the second you have a random internet outage.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

Iot is a terrible fucking idea in general. It's bad enough to live through a power outage when you're living somewhere with an electric instead of gas stove, now imagine your fucking locks and toaster and shit don't work the second you have a random internet outage.

I just want a doorbell or camera to watch my packages for me.

 

[skjora]

Ikea's "trådfri" smart lighting system is pretty good. It consists of smart light bulbs with a per-bulb wireless connection that can be put in your old armatures, a remote, and a gateway unit. You can use just the bulbs and the remote, but connecting the gateway to your wifi router allows you to control your bulbs with your phone locally. It does *not* allow you to access your bulbs and whatever remotely though, the system only connects to the internet through your phone when there are software updates available, otherwise it's completely local. The wireless protocols are open source, and both the hardware and software is compatible with the competing Philips Hue system (among others) and others so you can pick and choose. There are also smart power outlets, so you could for example prepare your coffee maker in the evening and have a program turn it on in the morning.

I mainly use it to have bright, clear light during the day but warm dim light in the evening, and to turn off all my lights at once.

 

[Aidan]

I just want a doorbell or camera to watch my packages for me.

You can set up a raspberry pi with motion (https://motion-project.github.io/) to do this if that's all you want. It's easy to set up if you've got the DIY mindset, just a config file. Documentation is good though double check the version you get from the repository or whatever source you use when setting up the config file as some options do or don't apply depending on version and it merely logs the discrepancies then uses defaults and you may not realize it for awhile.

I've used this to watch various things for cheap and a Pi 4 is way overkill. I've also set it up on a laptop and plugged a webcam into it, using the webcam as the motion camera. You can set it up so that you can access the feeds from various devices in a browser, making a very easy and cheap home CCTV setup as accessible or inaccessible as you like. As far as I know it works with USB cameras, pi cam, laptop cameras and IP cameras so should be easy to test out.

There's motioneyeOS and another similar OS geared towards CCTV but I've never used them.

I haven't done anything with a Pi Zero but without having done any research, I'd say setting up a DIY Ring doorbell is do-able if you're looking for a safer Ring equivalent.

 

[spastic_bag]

The best IoT is DIY, for better or worse. This, however, will cost you more time and effort than you are willing to invest. But it doesn't sound like you're in the mood to homebrew your whole thing from scratch, so ignore me.

But while we're on the subject,

You can set up a raspberry pi

Ikea's "trådfri"

This and this. A Raspberry Pi with Node-RED/HomeAssistant and a Zigbee-to-USB-serial gateway dongle is pretty much the best start to a smarthome I can imagine. Zigbee devices (TRÅDFRI, Hue, Mijia, Aqara etc) are pretty painless to work with and require no internet connection at all, sometimes not even a hub/dongle. Zigbee sensors and switches run basically forever off a coin cell, need no setup past a simple pairing, can bind directly to controllers, and don't give a single unenthusiastic fuck about firmwares and updates and certificates. And with zigbee2mqtt, making fancy automation flows is pretty painless too.

 

[Toolbox]

LIFX bulbs aren't awful and don't require a secondary system to use like Phillips, but have the same issues as those when it comes to how you control things like dimming. If you don't replace your switches with their proprietary versions the only way you control bulbs other than off/on is through an app. If someone could hack these to work with whatever smart switches you want and locally on your own connection they would be the best in the business.

 

[Catler]

Good camera IoT devices either cost a subscription or a lot of personal time, there’s no free, it just depends what you value more.

I don’t want to deal with selfhosted nonsense, so I just pay for Ring. It works well and I don’t half to think about it.

I’ve got hue lights and love them, and a nest protect smoke alarm which provides some peace of mind.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Depends what you mean by 'can be secured'.

If you don't care about security and want every cop in the US and a bunch of weird nerds to be able to see your camera feeds, use a Ring camera.

If you want something that's close to 100% secure, then you need to build something with a camera being watched by something like ZoneMinder and roll your own alerts and microphone/speaker setup if you really have to do that sort of thing.

If you want moderate security I'd go with something based off the Tuya platform or another big Chinese IOT platform. No specific recommendations.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

Depends what you mean by 'can be secured'.

Something that won't be exposed to the internet by default, thanks for the recommendations.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

There's a lot of bad and useless IoT for sure, but I really like that I can just bring my toaster with me when going camping and it provides a simple 4G WiFi hotspot that VPNs into my home network. I didn't even have to configure any of that!

 

[Mister Uno]

From my knowledge, there is a thing called Home Assistant that is open-sourced. It's self-hosted, however they have a list of IoT shit that works with it (Integrations tab) and how well they integrate with the program, which varies.
I know someone who uses this and likes it. Hope this helps ya out.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Motioneye is worth it if you've got any capability to self host and all your stuff is on the same network since it's just a DVR that sources camera streams from the network and handles all the detection and such so the devices pushing the cameras don't have to. The critical part is that if you self host anything you can just throw it in a docker container and then use pi zeroes or ESP32-CAMs to provide the streams while it does all the motion detection, etc.

If you don't want to bother with that just track down a Wyze Cam V2 and run this firmware on it for good motion detection, monitoring etc that works entirely offline. You can always throw it into a motioneye setup later on if the need arises.

https://github.com/EliasKotlyar/Xiaomi-Dafang-Hacks

 

[Car Won't Crank]

Motioneye is worth it if you've got any capability to self host and all your stuff is on the same network since it's just a DVR that sources camera streams from the network and handles all the detection and such so the devices pushing the cameras don't have to. The critical part is that if you self host anything you can just throw it in a docker container and then use pi zeroes or ESP32-CAMs to provide the streams while it does all the motion detection, etc.

If you don't want to bother with that just track down a Wyze Cam V2 and run this firmware on it for good motion detection, monitoring etc that works entirely offline. You can always throw it into a motioneye setup later on if the need arises.

https://github.com/EliasKotlyar/Xiaomi-Dafang-Hacks

I haven't used Motioneye, but for self hosted NVRs I think Frigate NVR takes the cake. It's easily one of the best free, self hosted surveillance platforms that also integrates well with Hassos. The Docker install is better though. The only limitation of Frigate is having only the Google Coral asic for motion detection acceleration because those are all out of stock.

 

[Polarity]

Buy a standard security cam, not some piece of shit plastic doorbell that'll be discontinued in three years if it somehow lasts that long anyway.