Smart Doorbells Do you have one?

[Sharon Mehl]

Wondering if anyone has a Smart Doorbell? Curious on your opinions. With Prime Day on Monday thought it might be a possibility.

Thanks!

Sharon and Philip

[Bill Burdick]

Oh man, maybe I'm just paranoid but I'm leery of hooking up parts of my house to Wifi. I don't want anyone hacking my house.

-- Bill

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[jur1st]

I’ve got a Ring. It’s fine. You’ll be better off if you can hardwire it to power but that wasn’t an option for my place. 

-jb

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[Paul Kenyon]

My boss used to have a Ring.  He was pretty jaded about two things... the subscription you'll have to pay after the initial term expires (not sure if 1 or 2 years), and the video format wasn't something that easily integrated into Home Assistant.  IIRC, he ended up going with an RCA of all companies, which is one of the few that supports RSTP.  Basically, private cloud instead of putting blind trust into the public cloud.

I'm going off my memory of an old conversation so I'm not 100% on the above - might have some facts wrong.

-P

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[jur1st]

Yeah, it’s definitely a thing on rails. If I were in the market I would wait for one that integrates with HomeKit since you’ll get video storage for free going that way. That capability should be coming in the fall with the next version of iOS. 

-jb

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[Paul Kenyon]

Here's the doorbell/cam:

https://www.amazon.com/RCA-Doorbell-Security-Camera-Improved/dp/B07GN355R6/

Here are some more notes:

> my reason for liking it is an H.264 rtsp stream is available from it

> it’s kinda undocumented, but you can hook it into other systems that way

> it still has a proprietary app for setup, etc.

> also the rtsp stream doesn’t provide any kind of notification of doorbell events (button press, etc) - that’s all done from their app

> records locally to sd card in the device

> and then app provides a gateway to your own network kinda thing instead of all recordings on external server

> so there is a little bit of cloud service, but not as bad as a ring or nest

Apparently, the "gold standard" is https://www.doorbird.com/.  Expensive, uses POE instead of doorbell voltage.

https://ipcamtalk.com/forums/doorbells.80/ is a good source of information on what's out there.

-P

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[JTFlint]

I've used Google Nest suite ( doorbell cam, other security cams in and out, and smoke detectors) for awhile, at a different locations.

Overall, video quality has been good, and it has lots of nice features, like being able to look for someone talking, or package pickup, or movement, etc. Even recognizes people (but its not 100% in the dark).

I'd say its too expensive, however, both for the cam itself, but also for the data subscription. If memory serves, the subscription was at least better for the doorbell than the other cams. With the Nest App, it made using them pretty easy at a remote distance. I'm just glad I didn't have to pay for the subscriptions :).

I believe each camera has its own subscription - its not a shared bucket of storage? Anyways...
We're looking at Amcrest cameras suite (door bell, security cams with POE, etc). We've barely got the doorbell cam out of the box, so I guess reach out in a month or so, to see how its going? It has a 1 year trial for the cloud storage for it.  I believe we can stand up a local server for our own storage for it also.

[Billy Crook (now Billy Croan, Billy@Croan.org)]

How do you all manage extraneous alerts?  i.e. I don't need an alert when someone inside the house goes outside. walking the dogs for example.  But when a stranger walks up to the door, I want to hear about it before they can touch the button.

BTW.  If the list admin can contact me off list, I have a new email address that I would like to use here.  I am Billy Croan now, no longer Billy Crook.  And this list is still manual approval for new subscriptions and nobody's approved my new email address in a month's time leading me to fear the conductor jumped out of this train years ago.

Interesting find on the RCA doorbell cam.  I'd have to sand off their logo though, lest visitors think I'm 75 years old.  I'm using Ring today but I don't pay the subscription.  Ring is far too slow to record motion events unless you want to see the mailman's ass as he walks away.  I use it only for on-demand viewing, motion notification, and the intercom.

Ironically, Ring doesn't work to ring the bell any more.  It's clearly a software problem in the doorbell because it works for a while after I 'reboot my doorbell'. (facepalm).    And it stopped ringing my physical bell when I stopped paying the monthly dues to Ring.  Go figure....

If I buy another smart doorbell, it will only be if they designed it with a DPST switch that will always complete the circuit to ring the mechanical bell, even if I threw the whole thing in the microwave for ten minutes and reinstalled it on the wall still hot.  There is no excuse for Ring to have made that function dependant on software.

I have at least two cameras covering each area outside so a single technical problem is unlikely to take all video of an area offline.  I recommend combining that strategy with multiple access points if the cams are wireless, and multiple brands of cameras if you can afford it for the best reliability.  Don't forget to use an uptime monitor like nagios to be alerted pro-actively when some-thing's gone off-line.

Good to see the group is still alive!

[Sharon D]

Hey Walter (and others who may have put up some cameras since this conversation began),

Did you end up with the Amcrest cameras? We got the Nest and there is a monthly fee. A couple of weeks back a mother came by and left a flyer that her teen disappeared and left the flyer the police released; she was looking for a camera that might have picked up something. I sent the videos to the police; nothing direct but a person running towards the house early that morning about the time (didn't have direct line of sight but it would have been to see if the teen had walked into our line of sight.) Hadn't thought of that use before!

We need to figure out what to get, and basically how to power it for where we are wanting a visual.

Sharon

[Billy Croan]

Doorbell cameras are a gimmick.  I have a Ring and I regret it.  You should have cameras, sure.

But the products that bundle camera and doorbell make compromises and deliver both functions poorly.

My ring is ugly and large and fails to ring the doorbell if it's software is locked up.  To reboot it i have to get out a tiny allen wrench!  I regret it.

Keep your normal simple doorbell.  

For cameras, I recommend you maintain no fewer than two independent systems.  Wyze is a great choice for one of them.  Free online event storage.  Only buy their V3 model these days.  And put as large of a micro sd in them as you can find.  I've verified they work with microcenter 512gb cards.

Wyze is unique because it's the only one with onboard storage your control.  There is no charge for 24x7 recording to it's card slot.  And you can pull the card to rapidly scroll through the footage on a laptop screen after an incident.  It records one file per minute but I have a script I could share with you that merges those into 8 hour files which are postable to YouTube.

Wyze v2 also has an alternate firmware you can load that supports rtsp.  I'm sure v3 will follow in those footsteps if they don't just roll out rtsp into the base firmware that you automatically get over Wi-Fi.

Wyze also has a number of other features for instance, you can add a remotely controllable spotlight, and wyze doesn't have the continuous giveaway light like the nest cams do, so wyze cams easier to conceal.

Cameras do not belong at the level of a doorbell. The video footage is awkward at best and it guarantees somebody can tamper with or block the camera trivially if it's at the same level that it needs to be to be easily pressed as a doorbell.

Trendy as they may be combining those two products into one was a poor design decision.  They are antithetical. 

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[Chris Meyer]

There was a great talk at HOPE this year:

https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_1900_One_Ring_to_Surveil_Them_All.mp4

Chris

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[- jur1st-]

Since the thread started I added three Eufy cameras and later replaced my Ring with the Eufy doorbell. 

Eufy has a hub where data is stored locally and the cameras (not the doorbell) connect to iCloud for HomeKit Secure Video. No annual charges for the Eufy stuff but if you want more than I think two cameras for HKSV you've got to jump up to the top iCloud storage tier. 

In any case, the quality difference between the Eufy and Ring is staggering. It's got a better sensor, an aspect ratio more suited for it's placement on the building, and must be applying some lens correction because you dont' get the insane fish eye that you do on the Ring. 

Can't remember if Google Groups supports attachments or not, but I've attached screenshots from the Ring and Eufy doorbell. 

In terms of the cameras, like the Wyze, the Eufy's have spotlights but it's not going to replace a floodlight if that's what you're looking for. You can turn the red recording light on and off in the settings too.

Overall I'd say that the Eufy system lives between the Wyze and the Ring in terms of difficulty of administration. 

On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 9:59 AM Billy Croan <Bi...@croan.org> wrote:

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[Thomas Collins]

Use a 5 camera blink system for each property that I manage now. So far they have worked out great & the batteries have held up for almost 1.5 years @ this point. Night vision, speakers & mikes on all of them, night vision (sort of).

They alert & have alert areas & sensitivity adjustments. I am only using the black outside versions & not the white inside ones. Even w/ low latency for ISP out in BFE, they still work great.

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[Billy Croan]

Wyze upgraded their camera sensor bigtime in V3.  They're hard to find in stores still.  V2's are way more common.  But the V3's have great night vision, even WITHOUT IR illumination.

You can have color picture, at night.  That's also handy if your camera is inside a window. Because you don't want to have the IR illuminator turning on if your camera is behind a glass window or you just get a big glare.  You can adjust whether and your camera uses night vision (IR cut filter), and whether your camera's IR emitter turns on or not.

The spot light is more for communicating "hey, someone is watching right now" if you want to communicate that.  You can also set it to be motion activated, or to be on all night, but increase in brightness with motion or remote control.  It really impresses me that they were able to do all that for $29 a piece.

On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 10:45 AM - jur1st- <jur...@bitninja.org> wrote:

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[Billy Croan]

I'm not a fan of Ring, but I felt pretty let down by Dan Calacci's presentation.

The fetid political slant casts doubt on any and all facts claimed in the video, but if I do verify that Ring shares the address of my cam with police, I'll change that address to the local police department or the nearest officer's house if I don't finally just take it down.

PTO-TIP:  if your car's nav system lets you save your home address, and you keep a garage door opener inside your car too....  Change your home address to the biggest nearby gun-nut you know, or the nearest cop's house, so whoever steals your car someday can sit in their driveway while they crush their dreams of an easy home burglary.

Dan hypothesizes that doorbell video could be "streamed into police fusion centers"  What's a fusion center?  The emergency services call center for JoCo has regular public tours last I checked.  They're free, and the county citizen's academy is a fun way to spend 10 Thursday evenings.  Dinner's included. Y'all should check out.  Every cubicle has a half-rack of gear on desk-side ups inside a building in a building designed to withstand a direct tornado for days!  And they still have failover plans!

The presenter continues "The number of cameras in a census block should be available to the public daily"

-- Say's who?  That's not tech.  Keep your 'should' to yourself.  That's foaming zealotry.  What other private property does hipster glasses think should be counted up and made available to the public daily, I wonder.

Ring "didn't really have any security in their app at all".

-- The API is intended to be publicly visible.  It's part of a free public app available without pay or ID.  The trees in the park don't have any security either. <Gasp, this el173 h4x0r dumped a crit 0-day Sugar Maple vuln>

By the way, most police calls in JoCo are publicly mapped and timestamped in XML and JSON feeds.  The archives go back like ten years or more.

I wish the presentation had been more technical and less whinging about racial injustice in policing.  --quite overplayed at this point.  Dan also willingly conflates posts on Ring Neighborhood (Ring's obnoxious and unappealing attempt at a social network) with actual Ring Doorbell cameras. 

The truth of course is that anyone can post to 'Ring Neighborhoods' any video or pic from any camera, or (more commonly) just a one-line text message about some stray cat they saw taking a shit on their lawn.  A post does not equate to a Ring Doorbell.  They seldom equate to cognitive ability.

Every living being has the inalienable right to preserve a record of any thing they can experience, especially outdoors viewed from the land they own.  Dan's sense of entitlement and obsession with other private persons possessions and actions was palpable.  If he wants to walk to the train without any cameras "looking at him", he can simply buy all the land along the route and build a tunnel.

"moooom  They're looking at me again. make them stop"

And funny it is that the cameras on the train/station don't bother him.  I'm personally MUCH more concerned about government-owned cameras than those owned by my neighbor. 

But no, porch cams are a "Threat to civil liberties" Dan says!  Stop scratching your nuts in front of my house and you won't be worrying about your privacy being violated.

Ring cams "Capture wide swaths of public street" ... Yes.  The same public street that the camera owner paid for via property tax.

He admits he was motivated by searching for 'racial patterns".  Well that explains it....  I thought HOPE was a technical conference or at least focused on hacking.

I'm not sure that using a public API to gulp down public data and then saying he can't share it with the peasant audience because of PII concerns is hacking really either, but okay.  I guess God told him he was uniquely permitted to posses what he calls other people's PII, and we aren't. Legit.

Two stars on the presentation 'One Ring to Surveil Them All'.  The statistics on language used were somewhat interesting, if completely anecdotal and predictable.

I've been waiting for years for a way to overwrite Ring's firmware with something I could control.  Supporting RTSP or local storage, encryption.  Kinda sad that wasn't a priority.

The most I've 'hacked' my ring was I set up an RPi to act as an access point for mine.  (Inspired by all the time spent at home last year.)  I used a hall effect sensor on one of its gpio pins to detect when my front door opens.  When the door opens, a systemd service inserts a netfilter rule to block all traffic from the camera so it can't cause the damn chime to go off when someone in the house walks the dogs.  But if the door is closed and someone walks up outside it works the same it ever did.  Reminds me.... I need to add the garage door and its Ring stickup cam to that system.

I did try using Ring's away/home api for this, but with sometimes less than a second between opening the door and walking outside, the API latency was too great, and it beeps everyone's phones anyway when the away/home toggles which defeats the point of trying to reduce interruptions.

On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 10:41 AM Chris Meyer <wate...@gmail.com> wrote:

There was a great talk at HOPE this year:

https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_1900_One_Ring_to_Surveil_Them_All.mp4

On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 9:17 AM jur1st <jur...@bitninja.org> wrote:

Yeah, it’s definitely a thing on rails. If I were in the market I would wait for one that integrates with HomeKit since you’ll get video storage for free going that way. That capability should be coming in the fall with the next version of iOS.

On Jul 14, 2019, at 21:37, Paul Kenyon <rix...@gmail.com> wrote:

My boss used to have a Ring.  He was pretty jaded about two things... the subscription you'll have to pay after the initial term expires (not sure if 1 or 2 years), and the video format wasn't something that easily integrated into Home Assistant.  IIRC, he ended up going with an RCA of all companies, which is one of the few that supports RSTP.  Basically, private cloud instead of putting blind trust into the public cloud.

I'm going off my memory of an old conversation so I'm not 100% on the above - might have some facts wrong.

On Sun, Jul 14, 2019 at 9:20 PM jur1st <jur...@bitninja.org> wrote:

I’ve got a Ring. It’s fine. You’ll be better off if you can hardwire it to power but that wasn’t an option for my place.

On Jul 14, 2019, at 19:19, Bill Burdick <bill.b...@gmail.com> wrote:

Oh man, maybe I'm just paranoid but I'm leery of hooking up parts of my house to Wifi. I don't want anyone hacking my house.