Hey everyone,

We’ve built an open-source, privacy-preserving alternative to Ring cameras using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W (called Secluso). It uses end-to-end encryption to send videos from the camera to a mobile app, which is available both in Google Play Store and Apple App Store. We also support Obtainium for people that do not wish to use Google Play.

We’ve put in a lot of effort to make it easy to set up! You can set up our camera on your own Pi in less than 5 minutes with minimal technical expertise using our easy-to-use GUI deploy tool. Here are our setup guide and open source release.

The image shows a Pi in an official Raspberry Pi enclosure that you can use for your camera. We’ve also been working on a HAT for the Pi to add night vision, audio, temperature monitoring for safety, all in a compact form factor. You can see the HAT and an enclosure for the whole camera in the photo.

We’ve been working on this for almost 2 years now, and we look forward to we look forward to seeing what you all think!

  • jkaczman@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
    9·
    1 day ago

    Hi kibblebits,

    I pulled the links from the cloud camera controversies page from our website. We already had them compiled there. I didn’t pre-write any answers. And you can see from our GitHub history that we’ve been around for over a year and a half, and that we’re real people. Not bots.

    Our automatic updates rely on immutable releases, ensuring that we can’t pull them back to try to hide something malicious. Additionally, we have reproducible builds, proving that the binaries / deploy tool / OS were derived from our codebase.

    Everything is self-host able, you do not need to pay us to get anything working. Our plug and play camera is completely optional, we’re using it to help support our open source efforts and provide something that benefits the community.

    • kibblebits@quokk.auEnglish
      135·
      1 day ago

      Your audience is people who don’t want a corporation involved in their cameras yet you’re trying to start a corporation who is involved in their cameras. You should prepare yourself for significant pushback.

      • quick_snail@feddit.nlEnglish
        5·
        20 hours ago

        You can’t expect them to give away free Pi and cameras, you jerk

        Open source hardware companies sell hardware. Are you surprised?

        • kibblebits@quokk.auEnglish
          24·
          18 hours ago

          You’re purposefully not paying attention because you want them to not be shady.

      • scrion@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        24 hours ago

        There certainly would be a market for a network camera ecosystem provided by a company that people can trust. I don’t think it has to be all or nothing, plenty of people really are in no position to self-host.

        I’m not sure if there is anything out there that regular consumers currently could migrate to in case they want to get away from questionable companies. There are completely local systems (local recorder, no remote access), but those are lacking the home automation features / notifications, and well-respected brands that have been around (let’s say, Axis?) that are still closed source, not cross-platform and with pricing often not aimed at end customers.

        I didn’t check out this project, so I’m certainly not saying this is it and there habe been various criticism of this particular project here, but I’d love if a decent project would emerge in the space.

        Would you consider using a managed cloud solution + app if it’s open-source and properly end-to-end encrypted? How would a hypothetical company have to behave to be trustworthy, while still being allowed to profit? People here seem to like e. g. tuta.io for encrypted mail, I don’t see why a similar model could not work for network cameras.

        These are genuine questions btw., I myself am really annoyed at the status quo with its data breaches, blatant lies to customers about encryption, and corporations willfully cooperating with fascist governments by proactively providing video data. I’m not even going to talk about AI training.

        • kibblebits@quokk.auEnglish
          12·
          22 hours ago

          I would consider someone making a system that would run on a VPS and made zero external connections in regard to the camera software.

          The problem is auto updates, telemetry, how they probably require a phone app when a web browser is 100% capable. Did I compile that phone app myself? No.

          Most people don’t even know what to look for. Poor education. 🤷‍♂️ it’s too hard to help them. They should just get a local closed circuit system. It’s just about Amazon packages anyway

          • jkaczman@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
            4·
            21 hours ago

            Hi kibblebits, please see below!

            • We do not have telemetry.
            • Our Android app is fully byte-for-byte reproducible. If you build it locally on your machine using our reproducible build script, it will match byte-for-byte the one in our GitHub releases. You can read more about reproducible builds here. In addition to our Android app, our deploy tools, OS image and binaries have these as well. This guarantees they were built from the source from our repositories.
            • Our relay is self hostable on any VPS you like.

            We’d be happy to add an option to disable auto update in our next release.

            If you have any other ideas for features we can add or changes we should make, please let us know.