Interested to hear what other people are using before I purchase some to work with OpenHAB. Which style is best? IP, BNC or USB? Seen a project called motionpie which is now known as motioneyeos which turns a raspberry pi2 into a single or dual motion detecting camera. Thanks for any thoughts and experience you can share.
Hi Matt,
I am using MotionEye (not on a Raspberry pi), with one USB camera and one remote mjpeg stream and can report that it works very well. It’s really just a friendly frontend around the motion software, so any camera that is supported by motion should work.
In this configuration the motion detection is performed on the server, not on individual cameras, so you don’t have to worry about the camera supporting this.
I have my setup integrated with OpenHAB via the webhook support in MotionEye.
HTH.
Thanks HTH it sounds like a good way to go. Any thoughts on which actual camera to buy that will work well with motion software? How do they work with night vision with turning the IR LEDs on and off when needed. Is that a camera feature you need to look for or does the motion software handle this?
Neither of my cameras have night vision, but I don’t think that motions supports it. I would look for one that can turn on it’s night vision LEDs automatically.
In terms of cameras, anything that can provide an mjpeg stream directly over HTTP should work well.
I have two Y-cam camera’s, one outdoor, one indoor.
They are able to call an URL when detecting motion (in an area of the camera’s field of view), so you can integrate them with OpenHAB. But on the outdoor cam I get a lot of false positives at night because of bugs flying though the IR-lights.
I also read a lot of good things about the Foscam camera’s. They have a more advanced api compared to most camera’s and have quite a large userbase, due to the low price.
Using Motion you get a lot of traffic on your network (since your cams are streaming constantly) this can cause issues if they are on wifi.
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Good point about the constant traffic because even without wifi it could saturate an old switch if you have enough HD cameras working at the same time. I am still considering using 2 USB cameras plugged into a raspberry pi2 running motion. This way the one rpi2 runs two cameras and makes the setup slightly cheaper than foscams and allows me to drill and hide the cameras in the walls with very little seen. This has pros and cons as a camera whilst it looks bad, it also scares thieves away from breaking and damaging your house if they see a camera.
In the end I think the feature of having night vision handled automatically by a foscam camera is worth the extra $ and makes POE powering the cameras far easier. I could very easily find the false positives from bugs at night make this feature not worth using. The FOSCAM should also have very little network traffic until movement is detected which will keep the switch free to be used for HD video to multiple TVs.