our journey began when i made the admittedly short-sighted decision to
purchase three drop cat excuse me uh
nest cams without reading the fine print
sure they had excellent image quality a modern design and a super easy to use
app but there was one fatal flaw in
addition to the 150 dollar per camera
upfront cost nest wants a whopping 5 to
30 dollars per camera per month to store
the footage in the cloud for you and they offer no way for you to hook up
your own storage device so we put together
this it costs a third as much and has no
monthly fees speaking of things with no monthly fees
that is to say as long as you pay for it yearly private internet access it's a
vpn service that encrypts all of your internet traffic and uses a safe
protected ip it's got a ton of other useful features too so check it out at
the link below
there are a ton of reasons why someone might want a security camera system even
if you're not a drug dealer or whatever a handful of cameras on your property
can act as a deterrent for would-be burglars remember they're often after
the easy score not the big one they can be a convenient way to monitor your pets
or kids when they're at home alone they can significantly aid law enforcement's
efforts to recover stolen goods and this one's kind of a no-brainer they can even
lower your insurance rates making it so they effectively pay for themselves so
what do we got well the build for each is actually pretty simple all we need is a raspi
zero w so that's wireless so you don't need a dongle or anything like that
a little camera module it connects with a ribbon cable and there's even a
pre-built operating system some guy made called motion iOS is it free yeah sick
and open source all right let's do it since these cameras are intended for use
indoors we forwent any waterproofing but this could be done fairly easily with
some silicone and conformal coating so after two days of tinkering with the
software measuring the electronics and modifying some existing models from
thingiverse we had a couple of options for 3d printed enclosures for our
cameras so the model i found online actually needed a little modification
for the heatsink wait
the raspberry pi runs that hot yeah especially when you overclock which
we're gonna do we're overclocking
it's a it's a preset that's built in but you can get much better frame rate when
you overclock them and i made a little ARM that uh adjusts both ways so you got
lots of tilt and pan oh that's cool
i see we've taken the uh chinese action cam approach and ripped
off gopro hey man they make good stuff okay
other way
there you go not bad for those of you hoping to build
something similar at home you can pick up a case with holes already cut for the
official raspi camera modules from modmypi or you could get the models
linked in the description printed from a company like shapeways okay so i
pre-configured the os and the wi-fi as that can be a little time consuming the
first time but we should just need to plug it in and wait for it to boot up
hopefully it actually works right it's powered yeah i know but it might
not uh have detected it so now that we're booted up you can see our ip we've
got a login screen um we should really do a written guide on
this yeah just on the forum probably should if you could do that up for me
that would be great thanks
okay let's see the interface so this is really cool the number of customization
options in the software can look a little overwhelming at first but the
premise is pretty simple now we just have this camera module here attached to
this raspi at the moment so all we need
to do is add the camera in
set up our desired config so we're going to use 720p 10fps and then just set the
footage to store on one of our servers here at the office
what actually gets recorded is pretty much up to you so we're setting ours up
to just continuously record up to a maximum of 24 hour long clips with a
preservation length of one month after which the old footage will be
automagically deleted but you can also set it to record only when motion is
detected which will help you preserve space and your sanity if you ever have
to go back into the footage to look for something so our config will change a little bit
once we have multiple cameras but we can talk more about that later so this is
pretty cool already but we can take it to another level
a more conventional security camera enclosure would keep our razpi zeros
much safer outside and would look a lot
more like a professionally installed security system
so we actually borrowed the idea of a
common home security hack
buying fake cctv cameras off amazon
to kind of like set up around your property except
we are going to put real cameras inside
you know i'd say you're a genius but it was my idea
once our fake cameras arrived cracking them open revealed an almost entirely
empty casing perfect we did end up 3d printing a little
holding bracket for our camera but if i were you i wouldn't bother it's much
easier to just remove the black plastic piece that holds the fake camera and hot
glue the real one into place as for the power cable the rear housing
just needed a little hole for it so now that we have two cameras with the
potential for more it's actually recommended that you get another raspi
and run motion iOS on it as a server
with no camera attached so we've got an
example of what that might look like right here so most of its processing
power can be devoted to encoding footage to be stored onto your nas via the
network cable that way you can see all of your wi-fi cameras in one place
do note though that you will need something like a raspi three plus
because a pi zero won't be able to handle the load of a bunch of cameras so
that'll limit the resolution and the frame rate of the footage that can be
recorded to make this config work better the cameras themselves can be run in a
special setup called fast network camera mode which uses the pi zero's GPU to
encode a motion jpeg stream to the pi server for much higher image quality and
frame rate so you can check out the forum post in the description for a
how-to on that these actually look surprisingly good like that wide angle
looks sick yeah so both of them are running 720p 10fps right now which
doesn't sound like a lot but you know for a security camera it's actually
quite a bit yeah i mean these look way better than your average cctv and
all of the footage that you get can either be backed up to google drive so
buy expensive nest subscription or it can be stored directly on a local nas or
just a pc where it'll be safe from third parties and other prying eyes and
because you can choose your own camera elements you can decide what features
you want on each one so this one has a fairly narrow field of view whereas the
one that we have over there is using a wide-angle lens so i guess it's
conclusion time then this diy solution is a super awesome way to keep you in
control of your cameras and it can actually help save you a very
significant amount of money every month for your home or business
but there are some compromises first we're giving up any special
features like audio whether it's two-way or one-way
second the control panel does look pretty great as a mobile web page but
you'll need to do port forwarding tomfoolery in order to
access it remotely and there is currently no Android or iOS app and then
finally the casings
and mounts frankly don't really look that great
oh and keep in mind that you won't have any support number to call if you're
having issues as helpful as those typically may or may not be
the cove commuter is a portable bluetooth speaker that you can take
anywhere that's where the portable part comes in it connects via bluetooth that's where
the bluetooth part comes in and features 10 meter range that's almost 33 feet it
features an xbase subwoofer to let you feel the bass and it doubles as a
speaker phone for incoming calls the rechargeable battery can last up to
eight hours and it's water resistant with an ipx4 rating it's got two eq
modes one designed for indoors and one designed for outside and you can check
it out today at the link below so thanks for watching guys if you
disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at
the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has
cool shirts like this one sans hole
and our community forum which you should totally join which is by the way where
you're gonna find the guide for how to make yourself one of
these on lychee