How very Draconian 
Orā¦
The app doesāt support your Android version?
For cameras, Iād been planning on getting a pi and camera and putting them in an inexpensive outdoor housing from monoprice. If I can get it working, a motorized IR filter and the noIR camera gives me both modes, and I can run the whole thing off of one POE cable.
These other solutions are really interesting!
Something that I want to point out and that is support for features inside Openhab. Just because X hardware spouts it can do X feature does not mean it will work inside Openhab. Your idea of using Hikvision cameras with 2 way audio is not going to work unless you can code and willing to spend hours of unpaid work doing it. The IpCamera binding does not support 1 or 2 way audio and IF (note I state IF) it ever does it is most likely going to be Dahua cameras only since that is the only ones I own with mic/speaker. Dahua and Hikvision both have API abilities to do 2 way audio with GET / PUT, other brands are probably only going to work with the apps that come with their cameras or ONVIF if that ever becomes easy to do with a Java library. There are a number of Java libs but none are active and growing. Since you posted you want standalone and no clouds, I suspect the Hikvision app will refuse to work locally and all your data goes to their cloud first, same most likely with Dahua.
@MDAR
Sounds great your solution and even better that you report that you have it working. A tablet/phone mounted to the wall and something already possible to get working right now inside Openhab. 
Can it do these:
- Broadcast to all tablets around the house from 1 mic?
- Work in the background so you can display habpanel on the screen?
- Trigger events in openhab so it can open a habpanel that suits the task? ie If intercom is triggered at the gate, show a open gate button. If front door intercom is used, show a open front door button.
Finding the right way will be hard as you could use stand alone intercoms but then how much can they notify Openhab of events? You then have to walk up to a device to talk instead of just talking normally inside a room.
If looking at doing this myself I would look at Jarvis and Motion running on a PI per room. You could do something like āJarvis, tell my wife I am looking for herā and then jarvis can trigger text to speech around a multi room audio system. USB cameras plugged into the same PI would be cheap with motion, $30 per room extra and USB inspection style cameras could be installed in 12mm holes and will not be seen. I looked at doing this but gave it away due to night vision would not be as good as a decent IpCamera and a camera that is seen is a deterrent in the first place to prevent the place being broken into. Of course you would want to trial this on one setup before buying multiples and also see if your family is happy having spy cameras installed through a house.
I did contemplate using touch screens in each of the rooms but it seemed to work out to be fairly expensive by the time you added everything up. Although if I do wind up using a SBC in each room, perhaps I could revisit this idea. What I was primarily looking to do was replace the physical buttons with a small touch screen.
Just to clarify I wasnāt looking at using the Hikvision cameras inside the house (perhaps one in the kitchen / dining area), that would be a mostly external affair to ensure the block is well monitored. I am in two minds about monitoring the inside of the house. There is only me and my wife in what is going to be a big house. The new house will be more than twice the size of the current house, so the video inside was not so much about spying as it was about accurate presence detection. But there are other ways I could achieve that without needing to fill the house with cameras.
OK I am going to approach this from a totally different angleā¦ I am going to do what I always promise myself but never do when writing codeā¦ And that is to define the scope of the project using pseudo code before I even begin line 1 of code.
Start off by spitballing all the things I might want the HA system to do on paper (text file).
Once I have done that group together all of the parts that might need to work together to achieve that end (still only high level planning).
Start to refine the group task idea a bit more to find the easiest way to make that happen. Then think about what hardware I need to achieve that functionality.
(Spitball ideas) Define the scope of the projectā¦
Turn lights on and off - Dim / auto?
voice control system
Turn heating and cooling on / off (basic climate control - fans and AC)
Open / Lock doors
Open / Lock Windows
Open / Close blinds
Monitor the temperature / humidity inside and outside
Precense detection via phone
Security system itegration
Auto lights outside
Move air from downstairs to upstairs and upstairs to downstairs.
Rain sensing outside to determine if opening windows is viable.
Group first lot of interacting items togetherā¦
Turn heating and cooling on / off (basic climate control - fans and AC)
Open / Lock Windows
Open / Close blinds
Monitor the temperature / humidity inside and outside
Move air from downstairs to upstairs and upstairs to downstairs.
Rain sensing outside to determine if opening windows is viable.
Hardware / Controls group 1: Roughly how it will happenā¦
Fan speed contols manual and automatic
AC control manual and automatic
Lock / unlock windows - solinoids?
Open / close windows - motors?
Sense windows open / closed - contacts?
Open / close blinds - motors?
Monitor temp / humidity inisde and out - sensors
Rain sensing - sensors
Move internal air - fans
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Hi
Iāve had a quick play around this morning and can report the followingā¦
Yes, it certainly can.
The Samsung S3 was running IPWebcamPro, with audio enabled.
My Samcung S7 and Acer laptops could both connect to the IPWebcamPro web page and pull audio AND video
Oh yes, it can be run in the background 
Ummmā¦ Yesā¦
Or at least I got in working on the Samsung S7, but canāt quite get it working on the S3.
Pavel sent me a plugin that sends a HTTP GET request when movement is detected.
These three files need to be put in a folder called :
{internal_storage}/ipwebcam_video/scripts/postURL
Then I setup the plugin with this URL
http://{OH_IP:8080}/classicui/CMD?IPWebcamMovement=ON
What you do in openHAB after the item has been sent an update is entirely up to your imagination 
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habpanel viewer - talks to openHAB and can take pictures, detect motion and serve as a touch screen interface
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Sorry for the late replyā¦ Been working on writing a script for my Asus RT-AC68U router to talk to MQTT on a RPi. Now that little distraction is out of the way I can get back to thinking about the home automation system.
I do like the idea of a touch panel, but I am going to need time to really consider if this is not a little too high tech. Although the idea of being able to customize the buttons based upon changing requirements is kind of cool.
If I do go in that direction I want to stick with basic hardware like RPi and a simple touchscreen, rather that anything super exotic or unusual. I would need the code that runs on it to be nearly universal so in the event of a breakdown it would be easily swapped.
Yes and noā¦ As mentioned above, someone might rarely ring at the front gate and you need to open the gate. You donāt want to have an open gate button in every room, so using a touch panel it could be used more like a ābutton on demandā system. You donāt want to necessarily have it as an option until you need it, so fixed menus like those in the video arenāt necessarily the most desirable answer. I donāt know if I really want to go that far as extra hardware is just one more thing to reboot in the event of a power failure, a whole lot of re-synchronization just to turn on a light.
The other issue I have to consider is my eyesight is going to crap. Ever since my mid forties my eyesight has been getting worse and worse to the point I now need to put glasses on to read anything, otherwise everything is just a blur. I only need glasses for reading, so I donāt want to be constantly carrying around a pair of glasses just to turn on a light.
So I either need to make the text gigantic or use a combination of physical button and a touch screen but only use the touchscreen for some special feature which I wouldnāt mind putting glasses on to see.
Which fixed menus?
You can change the Velbus programming as often as you chance your socks off you really want?
The VelbusLink software is completely free and its your installation, so you can do whatever you like with it, whenever you like.
Further to that, openHAB2 can push text into the Oled panels if you want.
Fixed menus as inā¦ not dynamic. Iām sure you can setup the menu up exactly the way you want it, but it would be a fixed menu that that would need to scroll through options you donāt necessarily want to see.
What I am talking about is letās say someone presses the gate buzzer once a year (real anti social person that no one visits) you donāt really want a menu item for the gate buzzer that you continuously have to scroll past when you donāt want it.
Rather have it setup in such a way that a gate button is dynamically added to the touch panel only when it sense a press at the front gate otherwise it is never heard or seen from again.
There is no telling what room you may be in when someone pushes the gate button so why not have it display on all the panels until you take some kind of action, for it to then disappear again till next needed.
Oh I see.
For a Velbus glass panel, you can scroll in either direction, so put the gate stuff in the middle.
Orā¦
Scroll a message on the glass panel whenever someone presses the gate button and get openHAB2 to watch for a button press.
After a time out, the button presses can be ignored by openHAB2 and the scrolling message is cancelled.
(There is a way to switch On & Off different pages of a glass panel, but thatās not a supported feature in openHAB2ā¦ Yet)
But with a web browser enabled touch screen, thatās super easy in HabPanel.
Just get openHAB2 to push the name of the page that HabPanel has the gate stuff on to a string item, whenever someone presses the gate button HabPanel will show you the useful information by jumping to the right page.
(I use this for forcing CCTV images)
Or you could just put a sign above your gate button that says something likeā¦
āIf you donāt know me well enough to just walk in, or that there isnāt a bell attached to this button, ask yourself why youāre pressing the buttonā
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In the future it will be possible to run it cloudless. Theyāre in the progress to setup a personal / standalone server. You can follow the progress on their roadmap.
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Sorry for the long delay in replyingā¦ My cancer returned and I had to show it the door again.
Havenāt really progressed any of the previous ideas, but I have been giving quite a bit of thought to the microphone side of things.
If I want the voice activation to work seamlessly, without me yelling at it and to understand what I am saying, conventional microphones mounted at the wall arenāt going to work unless I walk over to them every time I want to issue a command.
That kind of defeats the purpose of voice activation, if I need to walk to the wall where the microphone is I might as well push a button to do the same thing.
So bearing this in mind I think I need to base whatever solution I adopt around the microphones. I have been looking at these for each of the rooms.
I really like this one:
same chip as the v2 mic array but already in a nice small wall mountable case.
works great for me even if several meters away.
Johannes
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Several good options. Iād like to roof mount one in each main room I want voice activated. So the ones that have the rear inputs would be best for me. I can 3d print up my own enclosures. Some have speaker outputs so a speaker could be mounted next to it.