This reminds me of another home security product called Cocoon, which uses sound instead of RF.
Side note: if you have a smart home security system that you're actually happy with, I'd like to hear about it. I've been doing research, and it seems almost nobody is happy with the current offerings. It is either equipment problems, or long, expensive contracts.
I sold security systems in 2008, door to door. (Icky, I know.) I had a long time to think about it, every day, and during pitches.
I soon stopped, because I think they aren't worth it (which made me the world's worst salesperson. I remember near the end talking one old woman out of it.) The first important thing is that they won't prevent the nightmare encounter where a thief enters the house when you're there. Second, police are too swamped to have ever reacted in time to catch the thief. To my knowledge, it has never, ever happened.
There is a possible benefit that it may truncate the time in the house. To me this is not a big issue, I suspect most competent thieves are efficient with time.
Finally, there is an unobservable deterrence effect, but that is easily obtained by faking the appearance of a system without needing to enter a contract and pay monitoring fees. The most useless thing about security systems, the monitoring, is the only thing that costs serious money.
The final benefit is life-alert style stuff, but there are better solutions for that.
On the other hand, there is a massive placebo effect, a sense of safety that the monitoring provides. I suppose that is what people pay for.
All good points, and I appreciate your perspective, thank you for replying. For me, I think the greatest benefit is what you mentioned about cutting short the time the intruder has in the home. If I am in a deep sleep, and someone breaks into my home, I would at least like to be awoken with enough time to arm myself (of course hoping that the siren was enough to scare off the intruder). If I'm not home, hopefully this might deter the intruder from getting far enough into the home to get at our valuables. This benefit can also be achieved with a couple dollars worth of the manual door sirens they sell at the hardware store, so I definitely see your point there about the monitoring fees and contracts.
I think this glosses over one benefit of monitoring: someone should be coming in the event an alert condition is triggered.
For example, if I was shot during an armed burglary, it is more likely that someone would be coming to my aid because of my alarm system than without it.
I personally don't feel more safe because of my alarm system. But, I do feel more hopeful that if my (or my spouse's or children's) safety is endangered, that someone will be coming that can increase the likelihood that we will survive that danger.
My family had ADT years ago and when we'd be on vacation and something triggered the alart it would take the police an hour or so to show up. This was in a small town too where they had nothing to do. If you're bleeding out, I doubt you'd just lay there for an hour.
"Second, police are too swamped to have ever reacted in time to catch the thief. To my knowledge, it has never, ever happened."
Anecdotally, I've seen Mountain View PD show up with 3 vehicles on a commercial false alarm in less than 3 minutes, and Sunnyvale PD show up in 1 minute to catch a shoplifter around Sprouts.
The only reason I'd want a home security system is to wake me up if I'm sleeping so that I can grab my gun.
Video cameras would be nice for checking in on the house when away, and for post-mortem purposes if there is a break-in. But I tend to worry about the security vulnerabilities and/or backdoors in the cameras sold for these purposes (particularly the cheap Chinese ones). It's not worth it if randos are spying on you in your own home.
Here's a bit of statistics for you [1]: for every time someone in the US shoots a burglar in self-defence, there are 900 burglars that successfully stole the firearms in the house and got away with it. So by relying on firearms for home self defence, you're 3 orders of magnitude more likely to be arming violent criminals (that are likely to come back and rob you or a neighbor again) than protecting yourself.
Shooting in self defense is a last resort. Especially at night. You'll generally be temporarily blind from the flash and an unprotected indoor shot will cause permanent hearing damage. That doesn't even include the trauma of shooting someone. Most people would just be happy if there attacker simply left at the sight of the firearm (and most do).
You don't know anything about my home defense setup to be wagging your finger at me. My guns are stored in a Graffunder safe when I'm not home. If you know anything about safes, you'll know those guns are not going anywhere, even if the burglars have all weekend with a blowtorch.
As someone else already pointed out, # of criminals shot vs. successful burglaries is a ridiculous statistic. But it's coming from the Violence Policy Center so that's not surprising.
What's your proposed alternative? If burglars are already armed and violent (your own words) I should disarm myself and submit myself to their mercy? No thanks.
Why limit focus to shootings, simply dissuading the intruder is far preferable and probably much more frequent. In my experience most gun owners don't want to shoot anybody.
If, as you suggest, it's much more frequent for a homeowner with a gun to dissuade an intruder without shooting, than it is for the homeowner to shoot the intruder, then it's obviously a much better choice to keep a convincing replica. In that case, you get most of the benefit of a real gun, but there's no chance of your kids injuring/killing someone, or you accidentally injuring/killing a family member, both of which are about as common as shooting an intruder.
Or: If your point is to avoid accidents and not to disarm people you can recommend they get a gun safe.
Around here gun safes are mandatory. And local hunters and sports shooters work together with the police to keep guns out of the hands of people who cannot be trusted.
Guns kept in proper gun safes are pretty much useless against intruders though.
(To be clear, I agree everyone should keep their guns properly stored in gun safes at all times, and I also think guns for self defence are a bad solution in first world countries.)
As sibling already pointed out these stats seems to only tell part of the story. I'd almost say they seem to be deliberately misleading.
Unless there is more details the fact that few burglars were shot probably tells us that most homeowners with guns are peaceful and just use the guns as a deterrent.
> But I tend to worry about the security vulnerabilities and/or backdoors in the cameras sold for these purposes
This is precisely why I try to use Raspberry Pi's for stuff like this. Even then, I do put the devices on a separate guest wifi network that is firewalled off from the rest of my network. It doesn't keep them from being used for DDoS or as a jump point for attackers, but at least it (hopefully) keeps them out of my local network.
That does sound interesting, would you mind sharing what camera hardware you use?
I didn't mention it in my other comment but about 6 months ago I did set up a "YI" brand dome camera[1] for my mother-in-law. It comes with a slick little iPhone/Android app for controlling it, and the setup process / onboarding the device onto her WiFi network was very smooth.
So anyway I was demoing their mobile app to her, and I was going to show her how you'd have to be on her WiFi network with the admin password to be able to access the video stream / device. So I disabled the WiFi on her phone to demo that. My jaw about hit the floor when the video stream was still working over her cellular modem (in other words the video was streaming over the Internet by default)! Note this was fresh out of the box, she didn't sign up for YI's cloud platform option or anything like that.
So yeah I would be very heavy on iptables rules if I were you.
I'm using the official raspberry pi camera module both with a model B and a zero-w. For night vision in my garage, I found a standalone infrared light similar to [1]
I've been meaning to put together a guest network that was only allowed to connect to a single VM / LXC container on my home server. Then I could set up a bunch of those cheap Chinese cameras and ensure that nobody was accessing them remotely while still enjoying internet-accessible video.
I would LOVE to have a security system that automatically locks doors inside the house and fills the room with a thick fog. There are fog machines that work faster than the ones in the club. Hard to find a way out of the room in that case. And hard to find and assault anyone, or steal things, with a thick fog.
Humane - can't get sued for leaving lasting damage - and also
As a fallback, I'd remoty enable use of really unpleasant sound or pepper spray on the perp.
If I lived in a rural area, I would also want a drone to take off half a mile away and film people coming to my house. That way I'd know who's coming and have a record of it even if they thought they destroyed all the surveillance video.
Thoughts? I believe these kinds of things would be far better for security than what's currently on the market.
> If I lived in a rural area, I would also want a drone to take off half a mile away and film people coming to my house. That way I'd know who's coming and have a record of it even if they thought they destroyed all the surveillance video.
I use security cameras strapped to the top of very high trees on my property, triggered by motion detection. Keep it simple. (Suburbs of a major city in Central Florida)
Unfortunately that's a legal minefield. Mantraps have various legal standing around the world, but you are likely to be successfully sued if they result in injury. Seems likely in the case of a panicky criminal who finds themselves suddenly boxed in with mysterious gas.
There are other considerations as well (via wikipedia [1]) : "There is also the possibility that such traps could endanger emergency service personnel such as firefighters who must forcefully enter such buildings during emergencies. As noted in the important US court case of Katko v. Briney, "the law has always placed a higher value upon human safety than upon mere rights of property"
I am pretty sure that a criminal who trespasses on a property that clearly says "private property" has no standing to sue you for what befalls them on your property. Within reason, of course.
That is why private islands have those signs - otherwise someone coming ashore could assume it is a regular public island.
I believe there is a British(?) system that works like this: A sound wavefront generating bar + stroboscope mounted above the door(s) plus fog dispensed from some chemical container.
What do you think about the benefits of just home monitoring/video recording?
I agree with you totally that a security system isn't going to deter or prevent anything. It's also not going to help get police to your house faster - that's basically impossible and active-monitoring tied into some BS ADP tactical ops center (who basically just call the cops for you) is basically worthless.
So my thought was to just have a really good recording system so that in the aftermath of whatever happens, you can give really good info to the police or your own PI to follow a lead. Basically the same thing that corner stores without security people do.
> So my thought was to just have a really good recording system so that in the aftermath of whatever happens, you can give really good info to the police...
I think along these same lines, so I have a combination of some raspberri pi's running a customized version of RPi-Cam-Web-Interface [1], and a ring.com video doorbell.
Speaking of the Ring, if you or anyone else that is reading this has experience with both Python and the SIP protocol, we would love your help with a python project that is trying to get a real-time video stream out of the Ring device without using their App.
I've been watching this project/issue with interest :) It is on my long todo list to dig into this. One of my worries is that even with a hardwired device, the doorbell transformer may not give enough juice for continuous video use. I notice that just after a few minutes of watching the live feed the health status reports 96% battery (down from 100%). Hopefully that isn't the case, and someone is able to find a way to pull the video feed without funneling it through ring.com's infrastructure (I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate a 24x7 video feed running through their systems :))
Well one "solution" could be to just grab "snapshots" of the camera once a second (if it responds fast enough) then close the connection.
I have a Ring "Pro" so the battery level isn't an issue and it's able to do live-view for a few hours no problem (I tried it by leaving the windows 10 app up and running on live view for a while).
Still, if it really is running SIP the whole way, then it most likely can be accessed locally without touching their infrastructure (unless they are using something custom for the Ring-Servers -> Doorbell connection...)
When I lived in a city flat I used to have a sinking feeling every time i came home as I got to the top of the stairs and expected to see the door ajar. Silly I know. Our car was broken into twice, because in those days stealing car stereos was a thing.
Anyway, when we got a house we also brought a diy alarm connected to the land line. It was liberating to know you weren't going to come home to any nasty surprises.
I looked into how they work and wasn't impressed. Easy to jam etc. So one day I may make my own wired one as a hobby project, just because I'm the kind of person who hangs out on HN and thinks that's cool :)
They all pretty much suck, there are some alright ad-hoc type of single-device options (downside of those is absolute reliance on a cloud-service)... but if you're looking for an integrated system for a property you own there's nothing decent.
I just cut my losses and installed a good security camera system that covers the full exterior (using Hikvision cameras and a DVR). If that doesn't deter someone an alarm won't, and at the very least I can keep an eye on anything suspicious and have evidence after the fact.
Mine is great. It sits quietly all night only to spring to life should something out of the ordinary happens. It knows friend from foe, pet from racoon, lost child from home invader, and is the result of a few thousand years of breading. Ill take my four-legged 90lb security system over anything networked. Seeing her sleeping on my couch strikes more fear in burglers than any blinking red light. And i trust her judgement more than the smartest of google's robots.
For a partially DIY option with a certified, well-tested security/fire alarm option a DSC 1832 with the IT-100 serial interface board is an excellent piece of kit. Bought one off a local security company and did all the install myself, and they verified it for me.
With the base board you can run a couple of relays to trigger whatever you'd like. I use it to turn on the lights when the alarm is tripped which helps the camera system I have actually get a picture and not just a dark room. It is also nice when coming home in the dark, and for automating light schedules when out of town.
The IT-100 gives a simple serial interface to monitor/control the entire system from a computer. I used cereal on debian to follow/interact with the serial stream, and a bunch of perl/bash scripts to do things like log events to a mysql database, turn on/off the zoneminder DVR system, manipulate relays, send emails, and pretty much do whatever I wanted.
As far as B&E deterrent, I think having the monitoring company stickers is 90% of the benefit since most criminals are looking for a quick low-risk fix and will just hit your neighbour without a security system. That said, making it hard for them to hang around and really clean you out makes me feel a lot safer, since most valuable are hidden away somewhat.
I also like the cameras so I can check in while out of town. I have heard that video footage has to be REALLY cut and dried as far as identity for the police to use it, so low-res or low-light images are probably useless for prosecution.
You may find that the monitoring costs are paid for by a house-insurance discount that you get for having active fire alarm monitoring
Still, probably not as good as a vicious-sounding dog.
My understanding is that camera are pretty useless in terms of catching people cognizant enough to wear a hoodie/mask, but are useful in convincing your insurance company that a burglary did in fact happen
>I also like the cameras so I can check in while out of town.
Yeah, I have a couple cameras and a temperature sensor. Especially on a longer trip, it's nice to be able to just look in now and then and see that everything seems to be OK. (Of course, it doesn't help if there's an extended power outage but that's rare where I live.)
Really long time ago at an boot sale I bought essentially complete security system made in early 90's by some smallish company that was probably spun-off from Tesla (ie. the elecronics manufacturer "Tesla n.p.") as part of privatization and then probably failed outright. The thing consisted of obviously repurposed parts of other systems and looked like one giant kludge.
But what was the interesting feature of this was that most sensors were based on infrasound, notionally they were meant to detect shattering glass, but somehow the sensitivity was tweaked in such way that they even detected opening of doors/windows (this was mentioned in manual as feature) and even could detect person moving around the room.
I've been happy with my Comcast home security system...but I've never actually armed it so I probably don't count. :-)
I have it because I had a triple play package, TV/phone/internet, and they offered me quadruple play, TV/phone/internet/security, on a two year package that was actually $40/month cheaper than my triple play and included Starz.
There have been a few minor things that I actually have found it useful for that have nothing to do with security, and could easily be accomplished by simpler means.
1. If there is a power outage while I am at work, I can find out when it started and how long it lasted from the security system logs, which log both power out and power back events. Before, I could figure out when power came back from my digital clocks that reset to 12:00 when power comes on. I could improve this if I added an electric analog clock, since in a power outage that would not reset but it would stop ticking. The amount of time the analog clock was behind would then tell the total time power was out, and the digital clock would tell how long ago power came on. That would not tell me if there was a single outage, or multiple outages. It would be fairly easy to build a gizmo specifically for that: analog electric clock hooked up through a relay in such a way that if it loses power, it does not come back on until you press a reset button. That clock would then record the time the first outage started. From that, the time power came back on for the last time (found via the digital clock), and the total outage duration (from the other analog electric clock), one could figure out if there had been a single outage or multiple outages.
2. I wanted to monitor my home temperature while away. I pointed the security camera at a thermometer, and then could use the remote camera app to look at it. (Later replaced with an ESP8266 and temperature sensor that takes a reading every minute and uploads to my website).
3. I had some work done on the house that required everyone present to use a respirator while work was in progress. I went and spent the day at my office, and used the camera to check if the workmen had left before I headed home.
> If there is a power outage while I am at work, I can find out when it started and how long it lasted from the security system logs...
Pingdom works well for this as well :)
> I wanted to monitor my home temperature while away. I pointed the security camera at a thermometer, and then could use the remote camera app to look at it. (Later replaced with en ESP8266 and temperature sensor that takes a reading every minute and uploads to my website).
Is there anything the ESP8266 can't do?? (I also have some of these - Wemos D1 minis) spread around my place for temperature monitoring and general geekery)
I made one out of what was left of an older system (door sensors, motion sensors). Its getting pretty old now as it predates arduinos and was made with a PIC (olimex PIC with ethernet board).
It just posts all of the events from the sensors to a VPS in the cloud (that I have already to run personal web sites). If its "set" with a post from my phone, it simply texts a list of people (wife, dad, good friend) that an "alarm" went off. Otherwise it just records the events for later curiosity.
I've also got one IP camera that I can jump on and look into the main room with.
It was nearly free except for the happy project time to build it and is all I've ever felt I needed.
It's not a full proper security system but could be made into one. I had it alert me when a certain room was entered or had a high temperature or humidity.
I say used (past tense) because some support is now discontinued but I think it is a worthwhile idea.
I haven't tried the sphere and not sure of the status.
New to alarm systems but just put Abode into my first house. Happy with the offering so far, integrates with z-wave and IFTTT. Happy to answer any questions on it: goabode.com
Side note: if you have a smart home security system that you're actually happy with, I'd like to hear about it. I've been doing research, and it seems almost nobody is happy with the current offerings. It is either equipment problems, or long, expensive contracts.