We aren’t too fond of cameras around here and there’s almost always someone home so it’s not really a necessity for us. Having said that, we’ve had a few cams for a while now and most important is the doorbell.
I’m certain for 95% of you I don’t have to explain why I want the Amazon/Ring bell gone.
I run HA and have deployed Frigate separately to start messing with IP cams.
Here is my question? I understand that you can take the feed from the Reolink bell/cams and import it into Frigate from which I will send it over to my home assistant. For those of you who already do this, how offline is it? Did you need to set up any kind of reolink account to adjust settings or do the initial login? Does the camera try to call home occasionally? Is it fully offline?
I learned my lesson with Amazon. I want to control this doorbell myself and I’d to avoid video, audio, or logs exiting my network without me knowing.
How has the Reolink - Frigate - Home Assistant trio panned out for you?
I have a few Reolink POE cameras(and poe doorbell) with an old mini pc running frigate, all on a battery backup so if the power goes for a bit the cameras and recording don’t. I also have a coral tpu installed in the mini pc.
All of my cameras are blocked at the firewall from leaving the network and they function fully, 100% local. When i plugged in the poe cable the cameras grabbed an ip address and you can interact with them through that.
As others have said there is also a home assistant integration for reolink that let’s you import and control the cameras from within home assistant as well as a frigate integration. I prefer having frigate on it’s own box so when i need to reboot home assistant my cameras are still recording.
Once it’s all set up you can have live video feed for each camera accessible within home assistant, on your dashboard if you like, as well as access to clips and continuous recordings depending on frigate configuration and storage capacity.