Novice Needing Help with Camera Recommendation that can Integrate with Home Assistant

[sid_]

Hi - I need a camera that will monitor the front of my house with good recognition at 17m possibly 24/7. I installed Home Assistant on my PC and I am looking for a camera that is compatible with it. This is just for testing - I will probably use Home Assistant on a Raspberry pi eventually. The camera can be mounted on an outside wall and connected to power and a wireless repeater in a low level loft space.

I'm afraid it's all quite confusing when I look at the specs and I seem to be going around in circles. My budget is 100 pounds or less for the camera, then I will probably need a micro SD card and a power supply for the camera as my wireless repeater is old and probably doesn't support PoE.

Any suggestions most welcome.

 

[Dan]

Hi @sid_

Your £100 budget is below the price range of most of the cameras we sell so there isn't really anything we can recommend that would be suitable.

Looking at the Home Assistant website they have a list of camera brands that have been proven to work with Home Assistant, from that list you would probably want to look at consumer brands like EZVIZ, Foscam, ReoLink, Google Nest.

 

[sid_]

Hi @sid_

Your £100 budget is below the price range of most of the cameras we sell so there isn't really anything we can recommend that would be suitable.

Looking at the Home Assistant website they have a list of camera brands that have been proven to work with Home Assistant, from that list you would probably want to look at consumer brands like EZVIZ, Foscam, ReoLink, Google Nest.

Thanks for the advice. I've just ordered a Reolink RLC-810A

 

[DigicapDave]

Remember that homeassistant will only update the picture every 10 seconds, and you should never use the highest quality stream in 'live' mode as this just doesn't play well with the interface. Gets a bit sluggish and prevents other aspects within the HA screen from working properly.

Adding an ONVIF camera also won't help as the ONVIF plugin is really limited and only brings you the main stream.

The camera you get must have a snapshot URL or an MJPEG url, which has to be working in VLC player first as a test. Always use the second stream at 640x480 max - This looks fine on nearly every homeassistant device apart from a normal PC screen which shows up the lower quality.

You then add a 'picture' card and then just add the URL in there for the best results.

I needed a live camera view for electronic gates and just getting a quick enough image wasn't as easy as homeassistant makes it out to be. Cheaper cameras simply couldn't cope.

 

[sid_]

I decided to ditch home assistant and just use the free Reolink software with the RLC-810A. I am delighted with both the camera and the software. I bought a 256GB Samsung EVO microSD card for recording and the whole setup is absolutely brilliant!