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! If you’re interested in our efforts in general outside of DIY, our main website with our pre-built offering is here: click to see our website
The poster’s account is under 1 day old. There are multiple brand new accounts interacting with this post, too.
And one of them is replying with positive sentiment.
But the one calling it sus is also 5 days old, and making good points.
🤔
I guess its just us in here then, among these AI bots.
I’ll wait.
Ideally the thing should be broken into a “Camera captures images and makes it available in an open format” side and an “Application for Linux/Windows/Mac/iOS/Android/whatever reads said open format data and shows it to the use/records it in local hardware”, so that if one’s chosen provider for one of the sides enshittifies you can easily replace it, but I can understand the tendency to make and launch the whole thing fully integrated as one non-interoperable big bundle from a single provider given that in practice “do it and they’ll come” projects that just provide data in an open format in the expectation that other people will make the software that uses it, almost always fail.
You can also flash a Wyze Doorbell v1 with Thingino
https://github.com/themactep/thingino-firmware/wiki/Camera:-Wyze-Doorbell-(V1)
Lots of ways self hosting ways of doing bidirectional rtsp doorbell.
Any good open-source nvrs that support bidirectional rtsp? I know zoneminder didn’t last time I checked.
Frigate has support for bidir audio
But it requires SSL to work, and WiFi cameras are not the greatest option for that kind of bandwidth.
I know, I tried it. It never worked right.
Why not just Thingino?
Thingino looks like a great option for changing firmware of IP cameras to be open-source, and is useful in local NVR-like setups! Our goal is to different: provide an end-to-end encrypted, easy-to-configure and easy-to-use WiFi camera.
Why a pi zero I’ve seen something like this done with an esp32 and a pi pico pi zero seems like putting an nvidia 1080 in your nes emu machine
We like the Pi because:
- It has a hardware-accelerated H.264 encoder (Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU). This allows video encoding to be off-loaded off the CPU.
- The extra compute allows us to do be able to do higher frame-rates and video quality than an ESP32 is capable of
- We made our motion detection for events more accurate through offering the option of human/pet/vehicle detection, which I don’t think ESP32 would be capable of (at least not in terms of the level of accuracy we currently achieve).
- I haven’t researched this, but I’m not sure if an ESP32 could handle the end-to-end encryption computation, unless it has a co-processor for it
But does it do frigate? Can it be used applessly?
Hi muusemuuse, this is meant to be a drop-in replacement to WiFi cameras (and therefore accessible to non-technical users, easy to use and easy to setup). Frigate is great, and we definitely recommend it if you have the time to get it up and running.
In regard to being able to use it without the app, that’s not possible unfortunately due to the end-to-end encryption that takes place. An application needs to be on the other end to decrypt things.
Our app is available through Obtainium if you do not like the Play Store. It is also reproducible, so you can verify to make sure it was derived from our mobile_client codebase.
Are only VPS relay’s supported at the moment? Presumably so the feed is accessible over the web?
I get that the project seems to be going for replicating a ring/wyze/etc style experience but being able to self-host a relay somehow seems like a logical addition. Would probably have to disavow connecting outside of the home network and leave that the responsibility of the user.
If you’re technical, you could probably put together a locally hosted server on your Linux machine and use Tailscale or something like that, it should work fine with the code as-is. Our server binary is in the runtime-binaries zip in the core GitHub release.
I would imagine most in this community would opt to use Tailscale or even Headscale rather than relying on a VPS.
I do find it funny how your post on Reddit only got a few upvotes yet here it gets a bunch. Really goes to show you the difference in attitude in each community.
Fair enough. Really appreciate the work ya’ll have put into this, definitely going to have to mess around with it. Just brought it up because of the community this is in.
I think the point is to be easier than frigate. Eg a full image like home assistant, not needing to fiddle with docker.
sus
Just out of curiosity, why?
Common commercial cameras such as Ring/Blink/Nest are privacy-invasive and have lots of controversies, some examples being…
- Ring provided employees with unfettered access to customer footage
- ADT technician spies on customers for 4.5 years
- Eufy lied about local-only storage
- Amazon has provided Ring doorbell footage to law enforcement 11 times in 2022 without the user’s permission
- Ring Super Bowl ad normalizes a civilian surveillance network
We started on this project a long time ago to fix these issues by making it so that no cloud provider can see your home security videos. It’s completely end to end encrypted and private-by-default. It also is super easy to use and doesn’t compromise on features. As it’s a Raspberry Pi and it’s open source, it’s completely auditable and not a black box (unlike these common camera providers).That means you can verify that nothing bad is going on within your camera, instead of relying on a promise from someone.
No I meant why it was being questioned as “sus”. No agenda, just genuinely interested to hear opinions.
Oddly ready with all the copy paste content.
Yep, 8minutes for the answer. A bit suss.
Not really. If I am posting something that I figure would generate discussion like this, I would have sources at the ready too. And though I am disabled now, I used to hash out 140+ wpm without errors, so this post would take maaaaaybe as much as 90 seconds, mostly formatting and a quick proofreading.
Not everything has to be ‘sus’, ‘dawg’.
We started on this project a long time ago to fix these issues by making it so that no cloud provider can see your home security videos.
Just like standard ONVIF RTSP cams with a local NVR? It’s not like this is a new thing.
Bloef
Hi Bloef, this is meant to be a drop-in replacement to WiFi cameras (and therefore easy to use and easy to setup). A local NVR is great, and we definitely recommend it if you have the time to get one up and running.
GitHub content, profit website, automatic over air updates, content like “Earn $5 in Secluso credit for every qualifying referred pre-order.”
Just sounds like not actually secure marketing itself as super secure.
I could dig more, but i don’t care much.
Edit: also how super fast they commented on your comment with a copy paste answer. Or just a bot
I think they’re just a privacy-focused startup that just wants to make a living off their work
Additional comment,
A computer that has its own Linux distro that does work but it clearly a demo.
Been taking $99 preorders for… two years?
Secluso will be taking “preorders” this month. Wanna bet how many years before it launches its hardware?
You don’t have to pre-order, just wait until it’s released and buy it then. And in this case you can get a raspi and test the product for yourself, so why spread FUD?
You’re not listening
this reply adds nothing. Please explain your position
And that makes them a corporation that cannot be trusted. Because if they have any data or access in any fashion… it’s not actually private.
And from what I can see it’s two people? Who are they. I want to know where they live and how they vote. It’s a lot of faith in the very very unknown. How will they handle government data requests?
You can already run DietPi and cam software for a very secure camera setup on your own for like $40 per camera (I dunno about price hikes lately)
Matrix. Bitwarden. Nextcloud. There are many examples of open-source, self-hosted applications that have for-profit companies that offer to host them for you as a service. Now if you use one of those Nextcloud providers to store your notes, can that providers read all your data? Of course. But for people who don’t want to self-host, it’s often a more trusted option than Google.
You’re not listening.
yeah, the 2 person startup big corporation. you lost your mind. if you want to make hardware, you can’t do it without a business, you’ll need to be handling money in quantities. not all businesses are bad.
Yuuup some red flags going on. “Look at all these possible controversies and doubts you may have! We already have the answers because we really want you to use this product!”
At least with other cameras they may be stealing my data and selling it but at least I can join a class action lawsuit and get some free credit monitoring out of it.
Right, I was just thinking about that. These two people, allegedly, are going to sell hardware and software and cloud storage in an industry that could very easily sue them… ehhhhhh. It doesn’t seem too thought out.
Typically these things try to make a huge separation between the code and any actual hardware or cloud service etc.
“We are super not looking at the videos you upload to our private cloud that is definitely not audited”
Agreed, it’s all very commercial. It’s nice that there’s a way to run it self hosted but in that case I prefer something like LightNVR.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
You can’t expect them to give away free Pi and cameras, you jerk
Open source hardware companies sell hardware. Are you surprised?
You’re purposefully not paying attention because you want them to not be shady.
This isn’t the first project like this, motionEye OS has been around for years.
Thanks for the reply! Based on what I know about motionEyeOS, I would say the projects have different goals.
From MotionEyeOS’s website: “Get instant email notifications when motion is detected.”, “Save recordings to cloud services, network drives, or local storage. Automatic backup and archiving options.”
We differ because we specifically made this to not compromise on functionality. We offer push notifications, easy private access via our mobile app, and the cloud relay cannot decrypt videos.(whereas it seems if you were to use the cloud with MotionEyeOS, they would not be encrypted).
While you could go local in MotionEyeOS to avoid that, it would be more inconvenient for most people, and we wanted something that could be a non-feature-compromising private replacement to modern cameras that’s simple to setup and easy to use.
I don’t mean the topic, I mean the project itself.
Nice! I’ve been wondering lately if there was an open-source solution for this
iirc pine64 so has a camera in their store
What temp ranges are these good for? Can it run off solar+battery?
How are you protecting against supply chain attacks?
Hi Brkdncr, thanks for the question!
We honestly do not have a concrete answer for the temp ranges. We’ve done some testing and made sure they stay under 150F in the 3D case shown in the picture.
We do not currently directly support solar/battery usage. You can probably DIY something together though!
For Software: We’ve started to thoroughly go through our dependencies by using the Cargo Vet tool, in addition to looking for unmaintained dependencies, dependencies that we can replace with a few lines of code, etc.
For Hardware: We’re using trusted hardware providers like Raspberry Pi to try to mitigate this.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Cargo is a red flag. It doesn’t verify any cryptographic signatures of what it downloads, unlike apt and maven.
To help mitigate that, we use Cargo.lock files to pin all of our dependencies checksums (integrity validation) until we want to upgrade. When we upgrade, we’re working on having Cargo Vet to manually go through (in addition to trusted third party auditors) to ensure the changed code isn’t malicious.
Where can I read more about cargo vet and these third party auditors?
https://mozilla.github.io/cargo-vet/index.html
2.4 “Importing Audits” goes into these third party auditors (the registry).
Very cool!
okay this is actually a cool project to work on
I like what this project is trying to do, self hosted security cameras need to be more accessible to get people to stop using corporate spyware.
I’m sorry, but it’s a pretty big oversight to push the security aspect so hard that you don’t say a single thing about the actual camera. Nothing on the functionality, specs, etc…
Sorry about that! Is there anything specific I can answer?
The base runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W. This is capable of running motion and AI detection (human/pet/vehicle). It supports live-streaming and motion/ai-detected events, which sends a 20 second video clip to the mobile app. All of this is end to end encrypted.
With DIY, you’re able to pick between an OV5647 and IMX219 sensor (Raspberry Pi Camera Module V1 and V2 respectively). With V1, it’s 1296x972. With V2, it’s 1640x1232 (97.4% of 1080p).
If you’re selling a complete package you should probably tell people what the specs they’re getting. But there’s nothing about the software features either. Besides security what does the firmware and software offer?
I think they are not selling anything yet, they are just providing software for camera and client and build instructions for hardware
There’s no pleasing some people. 🤣
I’ve been looking for something like this. To be more accurate, I’ve been looking for something that works as a doorbell/intercom, that doesn’t rely on big tech in some way or other. But this seems like a promising start.
I ended up going with Unifi (G4 Pro Doorbell) after my test-run with Reolink went… poorly. It’s technically still ‘big tech’ but all the parts are on my property and my control, and (at least for the doorbell, that’s all I’ve got so far) it works nearly-perfectly with HA (I can’t get custom screen messages to stick when assigned through HA).
Why did you opt for pro vs nonpro out of curiosity?
It’s been a bit but I do remember I wanted the bigger screen, the fingerprint and nfc readers are nice to integrate ‘eventually’, and I think it was only an extra like $75? Oh, and the secondary package cam, that was the main factor tbh.
I wanted to get the poe version + their chime, but I got vetoed since ‘we already have a mechanic chime’ and I don’t have PoE setup in the house. But my pitch for the pro model was successful and an easy sell.
The only thing worse than your partner vetoing you is when they’re right.
Thank you for the response, very informative!
Curious what went wrong with your Reolink run. That’s what I’ve got. Doesn’t require an app or account, and works with home assistant.
I bought a unit + 4tb surveillance drive, to replace a (what we thought was a) dying nest hardwired gen2 doorbell. I was excited - pulled it out of the box, ‘oh, it has an AC brick too! I can set it up and make sure it works before we install it’
Prepped the camera, prepped the nas to ingest the feed and drives, setup the non-proprietary stream (the acronym/letters escape me), all on the AC plug… And the feed, from the cam to the reolink app absolutely ground to a halt. I’m talking like, after 5 minutes of uptime, the feed was 60+ seconds behind. Absolutely wild. I restarted the app, phone, doorbell, no fix. I turned off the open-source (?) feed, going with only reolink’s proprietary stream. Better, but after 10 minutes it was still 30+ seconds behind. Reset the doorbell, set it up again, no change…
So either I got a defective/malfunctioning doorbell, a bad AC plug (but wouldn’t it just die if it was pulling too much power…?), the AC plug isn’t rated for anything more than very intital setup (I saw nothing about that in the instructions, and why would you do that…) or that is ‘working as intended’ which, why even bother if that is true.
B&H accepted both doorbell and drive, opened, no questions asked. Was very excited and it genuinely ruined my day. :(
Sorry to hear your bad experience. Was the acronym you were looking for ONVIF?
Yeah, that’s it!
I thought ONVIF is just the control, not the stream. the stream is normally RTSP
Maybe - I have two decades in tech but camera stuff is basically still new to me. I just know that the ootb system for reolink doesn’t play nice (or at all) with any systems that are foss/not reolink, so I had to toggle the setting for it to cooperate.
