Frigate NVR + Amcrest cameras. 100% local, private, on-device AI object recognition and classification. Can use a Google Coral USB TPU to speed that up. Runs on hardware as modest as a Raspberry Pi.
Empire Tech cameras are a bit better bang for your buck. The 4k models are great--be sure to read each model's strengths (low light, backlight, IR, near, far)
Frigate no longer recommends the Coral accelerator. I think Hailo is recommended now
Otherwise Frigate is great and integrates well with Home Assistant. I have a light on my office desk that comes on when a person is detected near the house, for instance
Without it, if you want to know when something is happening on camera, you have to use motion detection. Motion detection sucks. Everything sets it off. Shadows moving, insects... anything moving.
Object detection, and then human detection, is extremely useful. Thankfully thats become nearly trivia enough to happen on device, but even with just "dumb" cameras the open source, on network solutions are very good.
I would suggest Annke - They appear to be rebranded Ubiquiti/Amcrest cameras with modified Hikvision FW, with fully local capability and great quality (The $30 2k camera sells for $130 from Ubiquiti)
The other half, at least for Ring doorbells, is making it easy to get push notifications when button pressed, with instant two-way connection for chatting through the camera.
It's already hard enough as a "certified homelabber" to get these things set up and running.
I've found Reolink to be pretty much plug and play. Totally local. The NVR itself has PoE ports so all you have to be able to do is run a long ethernet cable.
I like Tp-Link Tapo for plug and play. They have some battery/wifi models that last quite a long time you mount with a magnet which is great for a temporary setup.
Security systems used to be 100x the cost (parts+install) before the cloud because you essentially needed a local NAS and to run a bunch of PoE enabled ethernet to each corner of your house.
Makerspaces and education are two areas of focus. no SW install, fully loads in under a second. through the Onshape integration and ability to run on Chromebooks, it's made its way into high school and university STEM curriculum.
it's a combination of JS, WASM, and WebGPU. the JIT engines are so much faster than you would imagine, especially if you tune your code right. workers allow for parallel processing on all of your CPU cores. WebGPU, at least in Chrome, is kind of amazing.
second KiCad. just had my first board printed a few months back. its an esp32 stackable daughterboard. first time doing anything like that outside of breadboarding, and it worked great.
this does not track with my experience, so possibly it's the nature of your app or the way it's coded. frameworks like react are notoriously crap. stick to pure html5/css/js and it can be extremely fast and light.
You could have clicked on my profile to find the app that you're criticizing unfairly. It does not use react, but it uses pure html5,css,js, it is extremely fast and light. And yet, there are things that it can not do simply because it runs in the browser, which is a poor operating system for a hard real time program to run under.
I did not criticize your app. I offered that your blanket statement that "The browser is an extremely poor medium to deliver applications" does not comport with my experience. And it looks like I nailed it, too. It is the nature of your application. Had you said "the browser does not offer a real time API which I need for my application", there would have been nothing to say. This is obviously true. Even native desktop apps provide an inadequate environment for "hard RT". So I suspect that is also not a true requirement, either.
You ignored the points of the GP and made an invalid claim of NTS (as it's fairly clear that the "you" was not directed at you personally) due to your failure to read. I expected better from a long-time HN user.
Well, there are apps that you can only do native, not in a browser, we agree on that. But I also think that the browser is actually providing a very compelling standard OS with batteries included for many kinds of applications, and now there is even webGPU. I am currently building a local-first interactive theorem prover with built-in IDE as a PWA, in TypeScript, and you have really cool tools you can use as a foundation for something like this, such as ProseMirror and IndexedDB. Of course the raw prover can also be run from the command line via node. Claude Code is also very useful in this environment. Yes, different browsers are an issue, but so much works on all modern ones.
this. webkit is intentionally hobbled and years behind the standards. browsers on iOS are forced to use webkit for ginned up security excuses/reasons so that no real browsers that implement full standards can complete with heavily taxed app store spyware.
