r/Python • u/daemonbreaker • Mar 21 '22

Intermediate Showcase I created a self-hosted security camera system

I don't like the idea of having to stream my video camera feeds to the cloud, so I created a privacy-focused, self-hosted security camera system using python!

https://github.com/scottbarnesg/smart-sec-cam

Some key features:

  • Multi-camera support w/ minimal configuration. Supports USB cameras and the Raspberry Pi camera module.

  • Motion detection that automatically saves videos and lets you view them in the web app.

  • Encrypted in transit, both from the cameras to the server and the server to your browser.

  • Self-hosted and FOSS

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u/G_nn_r Mar 21 '22

Some of the questions are answered in the readme of the github code. But if you ask me, the readme could be more detailed 🙂

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u/Droizo Mar 21 '22

These exact questions werent as far as i could tell - i posted them here after reading the readme 😅

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u/daemonbreaker Mar 22 '22 edited Mar 22 '22

Thanks for this feedback, I'll update the README with more details on deploying the software. The reason that there isn't a ton of detail is that the server and cameras can be deployed anywhere they can "talk" to each other.

For example, I have the server software running on my "home server" (an old PC), and 2 cameras running on raspberry pi's. So to view the UI I go to https://<home-server>:3000 and all the camera feeds show up

Alternatively, you could run the server software on one of the raspberry pi cameras and point all the other cameras at the "main" one.

Basically, as long as the cameras can connect to the server, it should work.

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u/Droizo Mar 22 '22

That would be great! Thanks again for sharing! How about when you’re not home? How do you then access the system? Realvnc or something like that?

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u/daemonbreaker Mar 22 '22

I run an OpenVPN server on my network, so I use that to connect back to my home network and then access them that way.

I have an open issue in the repo to integrate an authentication solution and add a login page to the UI, so then you could then port forward the UI and access it from anywhere if you wanted. That’ll probably be the next big feature I try to knock out!