I currently have an ADT system and am looking at ditching it for a HA green with zigbee adapter and doing motion sensors, door/window sensors, smoke alarms, etc over zigbee in HA. The roommate would like cameras and i would like something that doesnt require an account on a company servers that could go bankrupt or phone home. Any suggestions?
Edit: While I doubt it, would it be possible to continue using the ADT sensors with HA instead of having to replace them all? I am assuming they are proprietary garbage and won’t work, but being proved wrong would not be a bad thing.
edit 2: my idea so far
- HA Green (currently running on a Pi 4 just to get a feel for HAOS)
- Reolink home hub (for managing battery wireless cams and storing video recordings
- reolink Argus 3E cameras and possibly the doorbell (they detect motion, stream video, and have a floodlight which may get exposed to HA as entities under each cam device)
- HA ZBT-1 (for zigbee/matter devices)
- zigbee door/window contact sensors
Amcrest. Minus their doorbell cameras, which require internet access.
For reusing the ADT sensors that’s a bit complicated depending on what was installed, when, etc. I’m going to assume it’s a home alarm, if not you can probably ignore me! 😆
If all the sensors are hardwired you could maybe go with Konnected.
If they are wireless and it’s older it might be a Honeywell Vista series alarm, ADT re-branded them as SafeWatch Pro as far as I am aware. Vista series alarms have 2 options that are available that I am aware of. 1 is an EnvisaLink 4 by Eyez On and the other is a DIY ESPHome based option called esphome-vistaECP. There is also Alarm Decoder, but they seem kinda dead now and all their stuff is sold out.
If it’s a rebranded DSC PowerSeries the EnvisaLink 4 also works on it and the same person who made the other ESPHome project for Vista alarms has one for the DSC PowerSeries called esphome-DSCKeyBus
Aside from those I am unsure what all ADT has sold/rebranded over the years. Some stuff appears to maybe be Z-Wave, but unsure about all of it?
I am using esphome-vistaECP personally and once I got it setup it’s been working flawlessly!
I don’t see anything to indicate what it is. The sensors connect wirelessly to the panel that sits at the front door. But I see no branding on the sensors themselves unless maybe they’re on the back and I need to remove them to check. The system was installed in like 2023. The panel itself has no visible branding except for the ADT logo and it is currently not connected to my Wi-Fi network but it does apparently connect to ADT through cellular over I think it’s AT&T.
Look into frigate. It’s designed to work with home assistant and is incredibly reliable. It works with pretty much any camera that can publish a stream. That being said, most people recommend reo link
I found some Amcrest cameras on Craigslist, 4 being sold for $75, and that started my system.
I am looking at the Reolink Argus 3E with the reolink hub to handle the recording files. From what I understand, you can integrate the hub directly into HA and then all the cameras with their sensors become available from HA through the hub. So if, for example, you wanted to turn on the floodlight on the camera, you would tell Home Assistant, which would tell the hub, which would tell the camera.
Will you be recording the video? HA doesn’t do that on its own, but you can install the Frigate add-on if your hardware supports it. I recommend a good HDD for recording to. I have a WD purple just for video recordings.
I’m not sure how well an HA Green would do with Frigate, although it is possible to run it on a Raspberry Pi if you add something like a Coral via USB (https://coral.ai/products/accelerator/) to handle the heavy lifting… so a Green should be fine. Don’t take my word for it, though.
I am looking at the reolink battery cameras and the reolink hub would handle video recording. HA would be sending off notifications about motion detection and possibly used to live stream the video coming from the camera itself.
I use reolinks and didn’t have to sign up anywhere.
They are blocked from the internet and work perfectly fine
@RandomLegend
Just be aware that the battery powered Reolinks generally don’t support RTSP and rely on the app or a Reolink NVR.Looks like reolink may be the way to go. My question to you is are you using the home storage device or are you using the wired cameras directly with Home Assistant? I’m thinking about using the battery powered cameras. And from what I understand, they require the hub. So it would be camera to hub to home assistant. Correct?
I am using the Reolink 5MP E1 Zoom
But as @Claude Flammang@dju.social said - the battery powered ones do NOT provide a RTSP stream, therefore can’t be used without the Account.
I don’t know if the hub can connect to HA and i also don’t know if the Hub requres an account.
Sorry
The hub does not appear to require an account from everything I can tell, but I have also done limited research so far. Although according to the following post, the battery cameras will indeed work with Home Assistant with the hub as the bridge between them.
https://community.reolink.com/topic/13274/reolink-home-hub-supports-home-assistant. It also appears as though you can make the battery camera’s live stream too home assistant, but that obviously it drains battery quite fast while doing so. So you do not want to do so. In most cases you’ll want to use them in motion only detection mode. Are you able to stream the camera through the companion app on your smartphone with your wired cams?
What I’m looking to do is be able to live stream the camera from my smartphone when I’m not at home if I decide to. The vast majority of the time though, I would be using it in motion only mode so that I would receive a notification if there was motion and then could look at the camera.
Regarding your question: yes I can look at the feed through my app at any given time
I use the RTSP2web application in home assistant for better latency, as direct RTSP streaming from the cameras has a delay of around 5 seconds.
I then just plugged that web stream into a video card on one of my dashboards and made a little dropdown menu for a couple preset PTZ points to quickly change to
Hey, thanks so much. I am brand new to all of this, and so I really appreciate all the help. I’ve never even considered trying to do a smart home before because I want everything to be open source as much as I possibly can. Basically, everything I’ve ever seen is like Samsung this and Google that and cloud account this and Amazon account that and all that shit.
So far im thinking
- HA Green
- HA ZBT-1 (zigbee dongle)
- Reolink home hub (control wireless cams and recording storage)
- Reolink Argus 3E (camera)
- zigbee door/window sensors (of some sort)
- zigbee smoke alarm (future purchase)
- zigbee vibration sensor (washer/dryer running/stopped) (future purchase)
I’m not sure if I’ll need a motion sensor or not, because the cameras record when they detect motion, and so they might present a motion detection sensor to HA through the hub.
My goal here is to replace my ADT security system with something I don’t have to pay a monthly fee for and yet will be able to get the same functionality out of. I’m thinking I might need some sort of Zigbee buttons for arming and disarming the alarm and setting up those Zigbee buttons for a panic mode as well. I saw a YouTube video where in order to arm the alarm the guy had to press a Zigbee button twice and then had to press the same Zigbee button twice again within ten seconds or it wouldn’t do anything.
Edit: Something I ran across today that might also be cool is to put a light sensor inside the mailbox so that when the mailbox is opened, light will hit the sensor and trigger it. And so you can know that the mail has run.
Good setup idea!
I love Aqara for all the sensors stuff, their products work good for me and are a breeze to set up with my son-off ZigBee stick.
I do use a door sensor on my mailbox as its still quite dark in the morning where I live and when the postguy delivers there wouldn’t be enough light for it to trigger lol
Just to throw on some additional ideas: instead of a HA green you can get something like a HP EliteDesk G3 or Lenovo M75Q Tiny and run HA on that. You then have enough performance headroom for Frigate as your camera recorder even with machine learning based detection etc.
And you’d still have enough performance left to run something like Music Assistant 2.0
So far the only thing I find that I don’t particularly care for is that apparently you need the reolink app to set up the cameras for the first time. I wish there was an open source way of doing it, but I can at least get their app properly through the Aurora store in order to at least configure it. And I’m guessing that I will have to enable parental controls on my router and disable the hub from being able to access the internet. They may well be telling the truth about not using my data nefariously, but if I can just stop the hub from accessing the internet entirely, except during specific times where I manually check for software updates, then they can’t do anything.
Here at least, our mail is absolutely never delivered in the morning. It’s always mid to late afternoon. Although perhaps a door sensor might work better anyway, because sometimes if the mail person gets here really late, it might be dark, especially during winter, with the time change.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’m looking at those now.
A guy I trust uses blink cameras, but apparently they have some sort of local storage module that might allow the video to be stored locally instead of requiring cloud crap. I’m doing some preliminary research now to see what I can find out about it.
You can put SD cards into reolonks and store it on them aswell.
They host their own little local webui and offer can be fully integrated into HA
Anything on the low-end probably comes from China and requires an app or cloud account. Most are not NDAA compliant.
Axis is alright on their lower end stuff without all the AI bullshit.
Ubiquity is alright on the wired models.
