IP camera / Security system

Support
1

I don’t even know how or where to ask this question : I want to add a security camera to my freedombox.

(See? I told you I don’t know how to ask…).

Ok, background:

  1. I have an IP security camera that currently wirelessly connects to my non-freedombox home network. I can’t do much with it in it’s current configuration besides see what it sees using some stupid Android app on a smart phone. But the manufacturer says it can be added to a security system and supports downloading short 3 second videos to a server via FTP or SFTP or whatever. My “freedombox” is an Acer Netbook with a wireless card. I’m using the ethernet port to connect the Acer to my home network. I assume I could activate the wireless card and set up the netbook as a wireless server, connect the camera to this network, and have it send files there. Can someone point me in the right direction (or maybe just say, “this is outside the scope of freedombox”)?

  2. I also looked into adding a security system called “zoneminder” to my server - I know it’s not part of the Freedombox ecosystem, and it requires some configuration of Apache - do you think it’s ok to allow a non-Freedombox approved app to share my server (“Apache”) with Freedombox?

  3. Are there plans to add any kind of security system apps to Freedombox down the road? I’m seeing folks talk about a complete homemade security system with alerts for open windows/doors/cameras/motion detectors - all running on a raspberry pi. Just wondering…

Thanks in advance for any input/feedback.

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I’m not an FB expert but have used IP cameras in a few cases:

AFAIK FB doesn’t have any app yet for managing IP cameras. That sounds like a very useful future app for someone to develop though. Like packaging zoneminder as an FB app. Try suggesting it on the development forum here?

In the mean time: it is sometimes possible to run additional software on your machine independently of the freedombox software. It’s just a regular Debian system that happens to be running the FB software. I have found this is sometimes OK for small things but for big installs you risk interfering with components used by FB itself and messing up FB. You mention zoneminder requires messing with Apache so I would guess that sounds like a bad idea.

If you want zoneminder then maybe run it on a separate physical (or virtual) machine for now?

If you just want to grab images from your IP cams and are happy to do some scripting: most IP cams can be accessed from the commandline by vlc (in its cvlc form) or using the OpenCV library from Python or C. You can give commands that way that just grab the current image as png then could can do whatever you like with it, such as sftp it to an external server. (So that if the burglers take your FB itself you still have the pictures of them).

Some IP cams also have quite fancy internal servers which let you control them through their own hosted webpage or ssh into them, possibly some high end ones might have advanced options to send images to an external server by themselves from there.

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