Summary of "Dmood176Final"

Project Overview (Source: Dualmood)

Dualmood builds a security camera using a Raspberry Pi, primarily to save money and minimize power consumption and wiring.

Spent < $50 on materials.
Compared to commercial security cameras costing ~$200–$400 per camera.
Minimal wiring:
- Powers the camera via USB-C (cheap and convenient).
Low power usage:
- About ~3.5 W average, compared to ~20 W+ for many professional cameras.

Uses IPv4 forwarding and also experimented with some IPv6.
- The IPv4/IPv6 approach became problematic.
Steps taken:
- Created a new subnet.
- Set up a VPN to tunnel traffic between a personal computer and the Raspberry Pi for remote access.
Issues encountered:
- DNS issues during VPN setup.
VPN/tooling choices:
- Tried Twingate first (previously reliable), but encountered a critical problem:
  - When active on both devices, there was no internet access.
- Switched to Tailscale, which worked smoothly:
  - Resolved earlier VPN/DNS problems and improved connectivity.
Additional friction:
- Connecting from the Pi to the file server required re-authentication each time (the Pi has no screen).
- Adjusted workflow to resolve this, aided by the shift to Tailscale.

Lesson learned: networking and remote access issues can be time-consuming and are often unavoidable.

After recording, videos must be stored on a drive:
- Determined where recordings are stored
- Moved copies to a cloud server
- Configured a RAID partition on the server for large and growing storage needs (video grows quickly)

The built-in SFTP plugin in the camera system did not work.
Instead, a custom backup script was written to copy locally stored video files to the cloud server.
The script was scheduled using Linux cron to run nightly.

Motion detection requires processing the input stream to detect movement.
Used motion detection masking:
- Example: masked out a sidewalk area to prevent unwanted triggers.
Video playback/UI supports:
- Live streaming
- Viewing past pictures/videos
- Sorting by date

Primary user:
- Limited settings (e.g., number of streams visible)
Admin user:
- Full settings access, including:
  - Brightness adjustment
  - Resolution
  - Rotate
  - FPS
  - File storage details
  - Disk usage

VPN/network connectivity can take much longer than expected; networking issues are inevitable.
Changing VPN/device configurations can lead to getting locked out of the Pi.
Vendor integrations can be too rigid:
- Twingate wasn’t designed for non-user-facing devices, contributing to the switch.
- MotionEye/provided plugins were tightly integrated and lacked flexibility.
Recommendation for future work:
- Consider writing more components from scratch if it better matches requirements.
Always plan for storage growth, since video accumulates rapidly.