Best MotionEyeOS Cameras

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Warren Binder

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Dec 12, 2018, 9:50:33 PM12/12/18
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I am planning to use MotionEyeOS and raspberry pis to make a Christmas gift for my Dad. 

I currently have a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ as a server and 4 Raspberry Pi Zero Ws coming in the mail soon, to act as the security cameras. We will be using them outside, during the day and night.

I have been researching into Raspberry Pi night vision cameras for my Zero Ws and I haven't had that much luck. The best camera that I have found are these on Amazon here, for $25 per camera.

Does anybody have any experience with night vision cameras for the Raspberry Pi Zero W? Any recommendations? (I'm trying to save money where I can)

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Thank you and happy holidays! 

Alexandru Marzenco

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Dec 13, 2018, 5:08:45 AM12/13/18
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Hello,

You choice of cameras is not the best. I use 3 UNV (Uniview) bullet ip cameras, that not only offer me a ton of flexibility but much more security. Your problem will be the following: regardless of camera you won't be able to make it work at a decent resolution and a decent frame rate, so your 5mp camera will be limited to VGA res, at 5 FPS, RPi 3 won't even take 1 1080p 25FPS stream, caps it out at 10fps.

My recomandation is as follows: ditch the RPi server and replace it with a half-decent computer, install Debian, shove in a hard drive, put a few commands and make it the MotionEye server. (yes, you can install MotionEye on Debian) as for the cameras, either ask for refund (the zero W could do its job, maybe, not as good as a bullet camera) and get some proper ip cameras or use them as cameras. My recomandation though, is to ditch the pi cams.

My personal setup is as follows
3x UNV Bullet IP Cameras 1080p 25FPS
1x 6TB WD Purple HDD
1x Intel Xeon E5646 6 core 2.4GHz
1x 4GB of DDR 3 ECC RAM
MotionEye running on Debian, in a virtual machine on my server (that's where I have those resources allocated from)
Dedicated POE switch and router for the CCTV

I get 3x 1080p streams at 14-19 fps, but stable.
I recommend installing netdata on the server as well, for. Monitoring the performance

larry...@larrypscott.com

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Dec 13, 2018, 7:27:36 AM12/13/18
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I use these ELP camera with zeros they work pretty good!

ELP 1megapixel Day Night Vision Indoor&outdoor Cctv Usb Dome Housing Camera Vandal-proof for House and Pc Industrial Security.cctv Camera for Baby Monitor, Pets Monitor,home Security

dew...@gmail.com

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Dec 13, 2018, 3:56:20 PM12/13/18
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I will certainly vouch for the ELP 1MP cameras!  While the Waveshare Raspberry Pi cameras give excellent resolutions, I find the ELP cameras to be the best outdoor cameras for my 8, soon to be 11 camera system.  I get mine from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/ELP-1megapixel-Vandal-proof-Industrial-Security-cctv/dp/B00VFLWOC0.
Day.jpg
Night.jpg
Outside.jpg
Inside.jpg

Warren Binder

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Dec 14, 2018, 2:52:41 AM12/14/18
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Thanks for all of the replies! Unfortunately, I am already committed to use Raspberry Pis as my main hardware. I am looking for purely cameras because I have already bought enclosures for the Pis and cameras too!

Unfortunately, I am looking for cameras that do not emit light for night vision because I don't want to make it obvious that the cameras are there. I live on a corner on a busy street.

I would prefer to find cameras that would plug directly in the Pi but I am open to using usb cameras too. 

Thanks!

larry...@larrypscott.com

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Dec 14, 2018, 9:06:11 AM12/14/18
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ELP meets all your requirements and you cannot barely see the IR not enough someone will notice

Alan McKay

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Dec 28, 2018, 8:42:26 AM12/28/18
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> I use these ELP camera with zeros they work pretty good!

OK I bought a couple of these but not sure how to use them. My goal
was to have them connected to a regular Pi and feed them remotely to
MotionEyeOS
My Pi has the latest release of Rasbian and when I plug it in I see
the system recognizes the camera. I'm just not sure how to feed that
across the network. Should I install MotionEye on this Pi? Or maybe
something else?

[149622.932689] usb 1-1.5: new high-speed USB device number 5 using dwc_otg
[149623.116394] usb 1-1.5: New USB device found, idVendor=05a3, idProduct=9310
[149623.116407] usb 1-1.5: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=1,
SerialNumber=0
[149623.116416] usb 1-1.5: Product: USB 2.0 Camera
[149623.116425] usb 1-1.5: Manufacturer: HD Camera Manufacturer
[149623.281031] media: Linux media interface: v0.10
[149623.306666] Linux video capture interface: v2.00
[149623.340524] usb 1-1.5: 3:1: cannot get freq at ep 0x84
[149623.357093] usbcore: registered new interface driver snd-usb-audio
[149623.358840] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device USB 2.0 Camera (05a3:9310)
[149623.372141] uvcvideo 1-1.5:1.0: Entity type for entity Extension 4
was not initialized!
[149623.372151] uvcvideo 1-1.5:1.0: Entity type for entity Processing
3 was not initialized!
[149623.372157] uvcvideo 1-1.5:1.0: Entity type for entity Camera 1
was not initialized!
[149623.372371] input: USB 2.0 Camera: HD USB Camera as
/devices/platform/soc/3f980000.usb/usb1/1-1/1-1.5/1-1.5:1.0/input/input0
[149623.372506] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo
[149623.372509] USB Video Class driver (1.1.1)
root@rpi01:~#
root@rpi01:~#
root@rpi01:~# ls -alh /dev/ | grep "Dec 28"
drwxr-xr-x 16 root root 3.4K Dec 28 08:31 .
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 640 Dec 28 08:30 block
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 2.5K Dec 28 08:31 char
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 140 Dec 28 08:30 disk
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 120 Dec 28 08:31 input
crw------- 1 root root 242, 0 Dec 28 08:31 media0
crw-rw-rw- 1 root tty 5, 2 Dec 28 08:40 ptmx
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 220 Dec 28 08:31 snd
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 80 Dec 28 08:31 v4l
crw-rw---- 1 root video 81, 0 Dec 28 08:31 video0
root@rpi01:~#

dew...@gmail.com

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Dec 28, 2018, 8:47:33 AM12/28/18
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Yes, install motionEyeOS on the PI with the ELP camera.  On the Pi that you want to receive the ELP camera over the network, go to "Add Camera", select remote motionEyeOS camera, enter the user name and password for the Pi with the ELP, and you should see the ELP camera name pop up at the bottom... click ok.  You can add more cameras to this network Pi as you please, and you will be able to see and manipulate all the cameras just by enter the IP of the networked Pi into your preferred web browser.

Dewey

Dave Pickering

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Dec 28, 2018, 8:50:53 AM12/28/18
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Are USB camera's better than IP Camera's with regard to viewing the camera's on a remote device ie mobile phone ??

Alan McKay

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Dec 28, 2018, 8:52:31 AM12/28/18
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> Yes, install motionEyeOS on the PI with the ELP camera.

Any idea if there is a way to "roll my own" from Linux on the Pi?
I'm hoping the Pi can be more general purpose but I will do this if required.

dew...@gmail.com

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Dec 28, 2018, 8:58:13 AM12/28/18
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I don't know, so I'll defer to someone else.  I've always found the USB cameras extremely easy to interface with the Pi/motionEyeOS, so while I've considered them, I never tried a IP camera.  What I like about the USB and Waveshare Pi cameras is that they become part of the hardware, so the Pi is only communicating with one thing, the remote Pi console that all of the cameras are tied into.

Dewey

Kevin Shumaker

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Dec 28, 2018, 9:01:45 AM12/28/18
to Alan McKay, motioneye
You can install the motionEye package on a PI running Raspbian, but the performance is optimized in motionEyeOS to give you the best framerate and capabilities . 

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Thanks

Kevin Shumaker

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Kevin Shumaker

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Dec 28, 2018, 9:06:45 AM12/28/18
to dew...@gmail.com, motioneye
I use 3 D-Link DCS-5020 IP cameras, and a couple of USB cameras (generic Walmart dash cams), and a couple of test PIZeros with the PICam. They all feed to a RPi3B+ server running motionEyeOS, and do it well. I have overcome a few issues (failure to attach pics on notification, gray screens, etc) and are pretty stable.

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David Chew

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Dec 28, 2018, 9:09:36 AM12/28/18
to Alan McKay, motioneye
Yes you can put on Rasperian and then add MotionEye,   There are a couple articles and youtubes on it.   I have it running here on one of my test Pi's.   

Now if I could only get Windows IoT to work on it... 

On Fri, Dec 28, 2018 at 8:52 AM Alan McKay <alan....@gmail.com> wrote:
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Alan McKay

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Dec 28, 2018, 9:13:57 AM12/28/18
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This seems to offer some possibilities for me but the only thing I
don't like so far is that while most of them appear to be available on
Raspian they all want to install the complete X GUI system and I
specifically set up my Pi as headless to save horsepower.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Webcam

I'll keep digging

David Chew

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Dec 28, 2018, 9:17:57 AM12/28/18
to Alan McKay, motioneye
You can configure Rasperian to not start X server on the console if you want.   


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Alan McKay

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Dec 28, 2018, 9:51:59 AM12/28/18
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More googling and I found ffserver which seems to be exactly what I am
looking for.
It is part of the ffmpeg package and does not seem to want to install
all of X but it does want a lot of stuff :

The following NEW packages will be installed:
ffmpeg fontconfig-config fonts-dejavu-core libaacs0 libass5
libasyncns0 libavc1394-0 libavcodec57 libavdevice57 libavfilter6
libavformat57
libavresample3 libavutil55 libbdplus0 libbluray1 libbs2b0 libcaca0
libcairo2 libcdio-cdda1 libcdio-paranoia1 libcdio13 libchromaprint1
libdc1394-22 libdrm-amdgpu1 libdrm-freedreno1 libdrm-nouveau2
libdrm-radeon1 libebur128-1 libegl1-mesa libfftw3-double3 libflac8
libflite1
libfontconfig1 libfribidi0 libgbm1 libgl1-mesa-dri libgl1-mesa-glx
libglapi-mesa libgme0 libgraphite2-3 libgsm1 libharfbuzz0b libice6
libiec61883-0 libjack-jackd2-0 libllvm3.9 libmp3lame0 libmpg123-0
libogg0 libopenal-data libopenal1 libopencv-core2.4v5
libopencv-imgproc2.4v5
libopenjp2-7 libopenmpt0 libopus0 libpgm-5.2-0 libpixman-1-0
libpostproc54 libpulse0 libraw1394-11 librubberband2 libsdl2-2.0-0
libsensors4
libshine3 libsm6 libsnappy1v5 libsndfile1 libsndio6.1 libsodium18
libsoxr0 libspeex1 libssh-gcrypt-4 libswresample2 libswscale4
libtheora0
libtwolame0 libtxc-dxtn-s2tc libva-drm1 libva-x11-1 libva1
libvdpau-va-gl1 libvdpau1 libvorbis0a libvorbisenc2 libvorbisfile3
libvpx4
libwavpack1 libwayland-client0 libwayland-cursor0
libwayland-egl1-mesa libwayland-server0 libwebp6 libwebpmux2
libx11-xcb1 libx264-148
libx265-95 libxcb-dri2-0 libxcb-dri3-0 libxcb-glx0 libxcb-present0
libxcb-render0 libxcb-shape0 libxcb-shm0 libxcb-sync1 libxcb-xfixes0
libxcursor1 libxdamage1 libxfixes3 libxi6 libxinerama1 libxkbcommon0
libxrandr2 libxrender1 libxshmfence1 libxss1 libxtst6 libxv1
libxvidcore4
libxxf86vm1 libzmq5 libzvbi-common libzvbi0 mesa-va-drivers
mesa-vdpau-drivers va-driver-all vdpau-driver-all x11-common
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