Hello –
I know this is not a 100% fit for this community and I apologise - but I don’t really know where to ask best. There’s some selfhosting involved, so maybe the smart crowd here has some recommendations.
Here goes:
I want to mount a camera at a quite remote location. I have Wifi there that I can use (I pay for it, but its usage is shared, I don’t monopolize it). I do not have power there. It’s outside, mild in winter, quite warm in summer. I will not get there for months at a time. I want the camera to be private, not open to the world. Ideally I’d like a solar powered wifi camera that can connect to my home via Wireguard (I have that bit going, multiple roaming notebooks and phones connect to home, terminated in an Opnsense router).
I do not need any specific smart features on the camera - PTZ would be nice, but not even fully required.
I can come up with a configuration that involves a Raspberry Pi routing an off the shelf camera via a Wireguard tunnel, or similar, but that doubles the power issues I need to solve. I am not opposed to DIY a solution, but there’s the challenge of getting it well packaged in a waterproof way.
Considering I can’t really touch the wifi setup (cheap commercial router), I don’t really see a way to have a private connection without having some sort of a VPN (I could do others than wireguard in a pinch).
If you’d like to help me chip away at one or the other bit of this problem, I’d be very grateful.
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Is the traffic not already encrypted? What would wire guard be providing here?
I’d like this to not be on the public internet, as general hygiene, really. Putting a weak little camera out there where it can be easily caught by an ip/port scan and get hammered seems neither smart for the device itself nor for the network it’s in.
Have a look at Thingino. Comes with wireguard built in. No idea about the solar stuff though. Maybe run it off a generic 5V solar solution.
Yeah, seems there’s a lot of alternative firmwares out there. Thanks :)
https://github.com/gtxaspec/wz_mini_hacks adds wireguard and other features to a few supported Wyze cameras. I haven’t tried wireguard because mine is on my home network but it works great for streaming rtsp locally.
OH this is nice. I did dabble with the original Wyze Cams and alternative firmware long time ago, I should try this!
There’s a pretty cool write up by KittenLabs about their SolarCamPi project - it’s pretty involved as far as DIY projects though, even down to stripping features out of the Raspberry Pi so it would use as little power as possible..
Awhile back I dabbled with a timelapse setup where I had a battery, GoPro and a Raspberry Pi with a 4G hat for remote monitoring - using Tailscale as the VPN - but that was never intended to run 24/7. I just set those up and accepted that they’d run for as long as they ran and then collect them.
Lots of 4G/WiFi solar security cameras around as another sort of ‘all in one’ solution - typically the main issue is they all want you to use their app. If you can find one with rtsp or ONVIF it’s easier to make them work with whatever you want, though again you’d probably need a Raspberry Pi or something inbetween in order to create the VPN/Tailscale/WireGuard connection to keep it secure.
That SolarCamPi looks spectacular - however, do I just miss details on the hardware - what is needed, and how to get/assemble? It has a few photos, but apart from the basis being a Raspberry Pi Zero with a hat and some other stuff, it doesnt seem to show much.
Grab a regular ethernet connected camera with 12V supply and ONVIF compatible (most PTZ cameras like Amcrest or Vikylon are 12V), and a OpenWRT router like GLiNet’s cheapo units in bridge mode. They have a wireguard VPN active already, you just need to get it set up. Then you specify what subnet the inside of that router is so you can get to the camera, and access it via IP.
Put down a car battery, a cheap MPPT charger and a panel or two. The PowMr charge controllers have a couple of USB ports on them to power the router and they’re $50.
I’ve thought of bundling a small router, since I have a GLiNet lying around - but I am afraid power management will be challenging. Car battery and a few panels seem bulkier than I had in mind, and packaging that for weather is a challenge, too.
