this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
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I am all for local however my biggest issues with video doorbells tends to be the field of view, image quality and operating temperature ranges.
I live in a climate where +30C and -20C will happen at least for a few days a year and quite often I have seen doorbells just go offline below when it gets cold outside or physically degrade in the heat.
I want a highly durable device. These ESPCam devices kinda have crap optics, I want to clearly identify people in the dark.
I'm surprised I haven't heard more of this (makes me think its impossible), but I feel like the ideal world is buying big tech's hardware and overriding its firmware/software to talk to home assistance locally. I saw a post recently about someone making an google nest speaker work with home assistance and they really just made their own speaker and shoved it in a nest mini body. I like the hardware I have, I just wish I had more control over it, and sadly I don't know nearly enough to mess with firmware myself.
I’m in the process of trying something like this. The cameras I bought have serial ports and firmware packages that can be reverse engineered. That’s where I’m currently at; just having the knowledge that it’s possible. I haven’t reverse engineered anything before, so if my attempts don’t work my backup plan is to harvest the the raw components and cobble together my own firmware on a different MCU.